If you’re in sales or sales operations, you’ve probably run into a productivity problem at one point or another in your career. The truth is, sales has evolved way past the days of door-to-door, and with this evolution has come the good, the bad, and the overly complicated. Thankfully, there are simple ways to make life easier for your sales team, as this article describes.
Problem 1: Your Sales Team Hates Working in Your CRM
There’s a lot of information and data out there on CRMs in the industry today. In fact, if you’re not using a CRM, then you’ve probably been heavily considering migrating over to one.
CRM systems, like Salesforce, are critical when it comes to optimizing your marketing strategies, improving upsells, and creating solid relationships with your clients. They are a hub of incredibly valuable information and data that is used to drive the business forward and constantly improve the flow of incoming revenue. However, adoption rates on the user side are staggeringly low for a system that is quickly becoming the lifeforce of most businesses. If your sales team isn’t adequately leveraging your CRM and inputting necessary data, then you and your business could be in some serious trouble.
So why do sales representatives constantly opt for spreadsheets or avoid working in their CRM completely?
Solution: Give Them a CRM Experience that Fits the Way They Work
The reality is, most CRMs are extremely time-consuming. According to a study by HubSpot, manual data entry is the #1 CRM challenge for most companies. If the average amount of time for entering notes from a single call is roughly 7.5 minutes (source: Inside Sales), then it makes sense that most sales representatives would rather allocate that time to actual selling.
When you look at the layout of your CRM, it becomes increasingly obvious that most are designed for management rather than sales representatives. If we expect sales reps to efficiently and productively leverage their CRM, then we have to provide an experience that is designed for how they actually work.
GridBuddy from Validity is an application for Salesforce that pulls all the data you could ever want into a single, editable screen. In fact, it functions like a spreadsheet and the simplified interface is proven to increase end-user adoption and allow for data entry in less than half the amount of time it takes to do so in Salesforce directly. Imagine if your sales team was inputting data into the CRM in half the amount of time. Would that make a difference? See for yourself in the AppExchange!
If we expect sales reps to efficiently and productively leverage their CRM, then we have to provide an experience that is designed for how they actually work.
Problem 2: Low CRM User Adoption Causes Major Data Quality Issues
We know that sales representatives aren’t famous for their love of CRMs, but is it negatively impacting the business? The answer is undoubtedly yes. CRMs allow companies to gather customer data quickly, set attainable goals and forecasts, and increase profits over time. For this to work the way it was designed to, you need sales data inputted (and accurately at that) into the system.
On average, 60% of all sales updates never make it into the CRM (source: Saleshacker.com, 2016). That’s A LOT of data that doesn’t make it into your forecasts, your goals, and your sales strategy. This quickly turns into a data quality debacle.
Your customer data should be centric to your business and business goals. When your data quality is high, so is your customer engagement, campaign ROI, lead velocity, and other critical business functions. However, customer data quality is a hot topic, especially when it comes to effectively leveraging a CRM, but most companies don’t have proper visibility into their data quality. That hurts every department, including sales.
When your data quality is high, so is your customer engagement, campaign ROI, lead velocity, and other critical business functions.
Solution: Remove Data Quality Obstacles that Impede Sales
While Salesforce applications like GridBuddy improve overall user adoption (thereby improving data quality by association), it’s important to have proper visibility and trust in the data that you’re working with.
Validity Trust Assessments provide the insight you need to understand how the quality of your Salesforce data affects key business functions with assessments that you can run at any time. Trust Assessments helps sales leaders, operations, admin, and marketing leaders propel company growth and reduce spend by shedding light on where CRM data is impeding sales.
The best part? After evaluating how your data quality compares to the industry average, you receive a step-by-step remediation approach, so you don’t waste time overthinking where to focus your data cleanup efforts.
Problem 3: Productive and Easy Can Feel Like Opposing Goals
Productivity and making sales representative lives easier are two goals that seem at odds with each other. But, you don’t have to choose between a productive sales team and a happy sales team. Sounds like a dream come true, right?
It’s obvious that managing the sales pipeline and ensuring that your sales team is at the peak of productivity isn’t the easiest task. It gets even more difficult if you can’t trust the data that’s in your CRM, the data that’s driving some MAJOR business decisions.
Solution: Implement a Winning Solution that Marries Both Goals
Don’t worry, you have options. Validity products are bundled together with these critical problems in mind so that you really can have it all.
With GridBuddy, you’ll boost sales representative productivity and operational efficiency with spreadsheet-like grids and processes that streamline any Salesforce use case. Pair that with proper insight into your data quality with Trust Assessments and suddenly you have the winning combination: a productive, accurate, and happy sales process.
Make Life Easier for Your Sales Team: Save Them Time
If you could give your sales team a gift this year, we recommend giving them the gift of time back into their day. Not only would you be making their lives that much easier, but you also might get a shiny new “best boss ever” mug to put on your desk. Now we’re talking.
Interested in learning more about Validity and our products? Come check out all there is to know about sales productivity.