Too many companies are
completely lost when it comes to optimizing their sales cycle.
Most people realize that
an optimal sales cycle can be critical to success in the business world and
especially in the B2B world.
That's why we want to
help you sharpen your focus, so you can concentrate on what really makes a
difference and help you increase your sales figures.
Given that a typical B2B
sales cycle takes about 102 days, anything you can do to optimize the cycle and
lower that number is beneficial.
So what is the solution?
A good customer
relationship management (CRM) tool is the key to successful optimization of the
sales cycle.
In this article, we tell
you how by implementing a powerful and at the same time easy-to-use CRM, you
can positively influence your results.
The sales cycle
deconstructed
We don't want to sound
condescending and talk too much about the basic mechanics of a sales cycle, if
you're here you probably already know most of it.
We want to give you a
quick overview of a typical sales journey and then go straight into how a CRM
can help you optimize the various steps.
The basic flow in the
sales cycle is usually as follows:
Prospecting > Initial
Contact > Qualifying Leads > Nurturing Leads > Offer > Negotiations
> Closing the Sale/Deal
The cycle is then
completed by existing customers or clients referring your product or service to
others, which means the process starts all over again.
Customer retention is
another phase, but it is usually considered separate from the sales cycle.
Customer retention is more related to customer service and support, which is
another area where a CRM comes in handy. 57.3% of sales departments state that
they use some form of Lead Intelligence tool, e.g. a CRM, for their prospecting
needs.
Using a CRM to optimize
your sales cycle
Now let's look at the
relevant steps in the sales cycle individually and how a CRM, combined with a
well-thought-out sales strategy, can help improve the productivity of your
sales team and shorten the average time it takes to close a deal.
Prospecting
A good CRM platform
gives you a 360° overview of your leads and prospects. The type of data you
receive includes demographic information, location information and behavioral
information. All of this data can be analyzed to help you target your
prospecting efforts much more effectively.
Initial contact
A CRM gives you a
single, centralized place to store information about all your potential
customers. You can then use your CRM to build detailed customer profiles, add
sales manuals, and create communication templates that are easy for your sales
team to access and help them succeed the first time they make contact.
Qualifying of leads
Some CRM platforms for
sales, e.g. Efficy, enables integration with third-party applications that enable
salespeople to qualify leads more efficiently. It's quick and easy to add an
API that allows for automatic tracking of email opens and other behavioral
metrics.
Care of leads
Nurturing a lead is all
about good and focused communication. A CRM helps you automate tasks like email
sending and also gives you tons of information about your leads so you can
create tailored and value-driven email communication sequences.
Offer
The information you
receive from your CRM helps you present attractive and personalized offers to
your leads. A CRM also helps your sales team to streamline the process of
sending out offers to multiple leads automatically.
Negotiations
The negotiation stage of
the sales cycle is about answering questions and meeting objections. This step
can be facilitated by implementing a CRM platform that automates communication
and includes features such as automatic dialing and automatic display of
customer or lead data.
Complete the sale or
deal
The last step in the
sales cycle is closing the deal. The entire process leads up to this point and
each step has been aided by CRM data, sales materials, communication and task
automation.
The biggest advantage of
a CRM is that it saves a lot of time on everyday tasks in the sales cycle, e.g.
data entry, data analysis and searching for information about potential
customers. This means that sales staff can spend more time talking to leads and
driving them to a sale. Learn more about Lead Management by downloading our
free guide where we reveal all the secrets.
Develop a CRM-enhanced
strategy for the sales cycle
Now that you know how a
CRM can be used to strengthen each step of the sales cycle, the next step is to
create onestrategy that has a high probability of success.
You can use the data
tracked and generated by your CRM to take specific actions within an overall
framework or sales strategy. For example:
- Create an optimal customer profile or avatar: Search
your CRM data to find information about existing and past customers or
clients with the biggest deals, fastest conversion times and highest
recurring revenue. You can analyze the data further to find out what these
customers have in common, e.g. location, company size and how fast their
business is growing. Once you have this information, you can create an
optimal customer profile that can help you design your marketing and lead
generation campaigns.
- Use a scoring system to qualify leads: Qualifying leads
is an important part of the sales cycle and should not be overlooked. You
can use data from CRM to assign leads a score, based on how well they
match your optimal customer profile. You can also segment your lead lists
into different categories based on their score.
- Attract leads towards a sale: A CRM is the perfect tool
to help you identify leads that have stalled in the sales funnel and are
likely to drop off, or leads that are moving slower than desired. Once you
identify them, you can focus on your sales team and use nurturing
techniques to accelerate sales.
- Create case studies or success stories: Once you have
built a good database of customers, you can analyze the data to find those
who have been successful and use their stories to create case studies.
Case studies serve as great social proof for other leads, helping to
convince them that your solution is right for them and can convince them
to buy it.
If you want to find out how Efficy CRM can help you optimize your sales cycle in more detail, contact us today to schedule a demo.