Top 5 tips to eliminate data silos – Pt VIII

Estimated read time 5 min read

Tracking and keeping on top of emails can be stressful. Again, with your data and email correspondence in several places, managing prospect touchpoints can be tough.

Which is why the best job card softwares have email functionality baked into the platform. Simply integrate with your Gmail, Outlook or SMTP accounts, and you can send emails and schedule follow-ups on the fly.

Here are the email features to look out for when evaluating CRMs:

  • Email inbox: Email management tools that sync with your email inbox and include email tracking and email templates that can be used on the fly.
  • Customizable templates: Create outreach and follow-up templates that can be inserted and customized straight from your maintenance work order app, including customizable signatures to add value to your recipients.
  • Schedule activities: Update contact information and schedule activities without having to leave your email threads, such as by moving deals along the sales pipeline.
  • Advanced tracking: Know when a lead has opened an email, clicked a link or viewed an attachment, and use these triggers as signals to take action.

Email is the central nervous system of your sales communication. Be more productive by using the tools that make outreach and following-up easier.

Activity management

Your pipeline is the main stage, and sales activities are what runs in the background. The sales activities that contribute to deal flow are what makes or breaks success.

Your sales activities are manageable. These are the things you can control the most. While revenue growth is a key goal, it’s largely uncontrollable. But with apps for repair and maintenance you can control what you do to reach those goals.

These activities include phone calls, follow-up emails and meetings scheduled. These are all things that your reps have control over. As a sales manager, this is what you should be helping them to become better at.

Activity management functionality makes this much easier to keep on top of.

Look out for the following activity management features:

  • Activity scheduling: Attach activities at a deal, contact or organizational level, and then view these activities in your calendar or on a to-do list.
  • Assign activities: Make sure the right reps are working on the right activities by assigning specific activities to a rep who has more experience selling to an organization.
  • Customize activity types: Just as with deals, the right activities will vary from organization to organization. Most good ngo accounting software platforms come with basic activity tracking out of the box, but should also allow you to add your own.
  • Reminders: You should have a clear view of which activities are due (and overdue). Furthermore, you should have the option to receive reminders or notifications to let you know when critical activities need completing.

Contact management

The purpose of a field service management software is to help you manage customer relationships. So it only makes sense that the best CRM platforms give you as much insight on your customers as possible.

This includes details on their organization, contact details, email tracking (email opens etc.) and a communication timeline.

Even better, great CRM platforms can feed in contact data from other sources, such as LinkedIn and other social platforms. This data enrichment can provide you with a huge number of insights with very little work. You can then use this insight to personalize your prospect interactions.

Furthermore, you should be able to schedule sales activities, assign contacts to reps and send emails directly from the contact screen. Make sure you choose an ERP Software that provides you with as much contact insight as possible.

Sales reporting

With all the data available to you, your CRM should show you what you need to do with it. Sales reporting should help you answer the biggest questions. These can include why certain reps outperform others, as well as whether or not you’re on track to hit your annual target.

Great sales managers should know how many touchpoints and activities it takes to close a deal. You should also know how long deals take to close, as well as where certain bottlenecks lie.

Getting these insights isn’t a guessing game, which is why your CRM software should provide you ample reporting features to help you get the best insights from your sales efforts.

A live sales dashboard will give you real-time insights on deal statuses and rep performance. These are the key features to look for:

  • Visual dashboards: The best sales dashboards are simple and provide a snapshot of your most valuable information. Find a CRM that makes sales data easy to digest.
  • Customizable reports: Focus on the metrics that matter most. Whether you want to see how many open deals there are stage-by-stage or across a specific time period, your manufacturing software should give you the insight you need.
  • Categorize by product: You should also be able to see reports based on sales performance across specific products and services, including volume and discount amounts.

Not only does this make sales management more efficient, but you can also gamify your sales organization. Reps often love a little competition, so make your reports a central part of your leadership strategy.

Sales forecasting

Having a sales forecasting tool helps automate much of the cold storage software solution management process.

It can help your reps keep on track without you having to breathe down their necks. Which lets them get on with what they do best: selling.

A good forecasting tool should enable reps to figure out which activities and deals to focus their efforts on. Not only that, it should also stop any last-minute surprises from crawling out of the woodwork.

Here’s what to look for in a sales forecasting tool:

  • Ongoing deal view: See the total value of your ongoing deals and organize based on estimated close dates.
  • Customization: Tailor your forecasting views based on the dates and metrics that matter most to you.

 

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