Get your FREE 30-day trial.
Please complete all fields.
So, you’re growing your sales team. Congratulations–and hold on tight!
Rapid growth tests every aspect of sales management. Everything you’ve learned in the art and science of sales will need to be brought to bear to succeed.
It’s an exciting task, but it is intense. When all of your graphs are sloping steeply upward, it only takes a small bend in the curves to translate into missed targets at the end of the year. Meanwhile, all kinds of needs–from collateral to marketing to sales process–clamor for your attention.
Where should you focus?
When you’re growing a B2B direct sales team, three factors impact results the most:
So, can CRM help?
With the new world of mobile CRM, the answer is a resounding yes. With a platform like salesforce1–and solutions from partners like Selligy–CRM can become an even more powerful level for meeting results in high-growth stages.
Why? Because new mobile sales apps allow you to focus your CRM–and your team–like a laser on what you need to meet your goals.
Here are three must-do’s for turning mobile CRM into a growth accelerator:
What to do
Focus your team on logging sales meetings into CRM. Track who is and isn’t logging meetings. Make the team accountable to get this simple information in.
Why it will work
With new mobile apps, it is dramatically easier for your salespeople to capture this key information about what is happening with customers. (Indeed, mobile apps like Selligy can even send your team reminders to log a meeting in salesforce a few minutes after a meeting ends.) With the right mobile app, your team will spend less time entering data. But you'll get more insight into what’s going on with customers. And your whole team will spend less time in status meetings reporting the details of what has happened—and more time focusing on how to be more effective.
Why it will help you succeed
In addition to improving your visibility into sales, activity reporting will help you see that your most important goal is met: hiring the right salespeople.
Most sales leaders don’t really get a clear view that a new hire isn’t working out for several quarters—after which it’s too late to make up lost time.
But with simple activity reporting, you'll be able to detect trouble much sooner. You’ll see—in weeks, not quarters—that one of your reps isn’t getting as many meetings, that his meetings aren’t with the right people, and/or that his deals aren’t progressing as expected. You’ll find stuck deals while there is still time to save them. You will be able to get in and take action sooner, whether that’s better training, better coaching, or simply finding a better hire.
What to do
Put your CRM on a diet! Slim down all the extra fields in your mobile CRM app.
Why it will work
New mobile CRM apps are task-oriented, with apps that are just for salespeople. With so little screen space, it’s critical to exclude the fields that support, or finance or other departments need.
Why it will help you succeed
This tip is all about time to productivity. It is much better to make your CRM simple enough that your salespeople don’t need to be trained—or reminded—which fields you want filled out. If you don’t absolutely need the field filled out, hide it!
What to do
Pick one—or two at the most—questions you want to add to your team’s activity reports in salesforce.com to spot market trends. This could be tracking the use case that each customer is interested in. It could be tracking customer industries. It could be tracking what solution you are replacing.
Why it will work
Again, with new mobile CRM apps, you can make it much easier to capture this simple information from a mobile phone.
Why it will help you succeed
This helps you build a repeatable sales model. Generally, in growing markets, a trend emerges. Perhaps you will discover that your product is a big hit in Financial Services. Or maybe you’ll find that a certain incumbent solution is vulnerable to replacement.
Once you find this repeatable model, you can direct your marketing and sales efforts toward the path of least resistance. Sales cycles get shorter, sales productivity soars, and you blow by your targets. Usually, however, we find these patterns first by anecdote, and not until much trial and error is the trend confirmed.
Using mobile CRM, you can detect these critical trends sooner and with more confidence, because you’ll have actual data, not just anecdotes.
In the tumult of growing a team, CRM can seem like a distraction. Indeed, it can be if you start adding everything that ever comes up in your sales process into your CRM.
But in the new world of task-based, mobile sales apps, CRM can become a tool to focus, not distract—and help you manage one of the most exciting and high-stakes phases of your team’s success.
Chris van Loben Sels is director, marketing and business development, at Selligy, an AppExchange partner making great mobile applications for sales leaders and salespeople, leveraging the salesforce1 platform. You can reach him at chris@selligy.com and follow him on Twitter: @chrisvls
Join Selligy—along with Leyla Seka, salesforce.com, SVP & GM, desk.com and other AppExchange partners at Sales Velocity 2014 in San Francisco on July 15, 2014. And for more CRM tips, check out our free e-book by clicking below.
