How to increase sales efficiency in 30 minutes?

    For any business, the effectiveness of the sales team, and the sales process as such, is critical.

    And not surprisingly, there is no business without sales. No matter how good a product is, if you don’t know how to present it correctly, you won’t see the success of the company ...

    Everyone has to sell it - in industry, in tourism, in car dealerships, and in wholesale trade ... Almost every area involves an active sales department.

    When the question arises about the effectiveness of this department - the first thing you should pay attention to is what your method looks like (who answers the calls, how does the client's need come to know, do you ask the "sales" questions, how long the offer is made, etc.)

    And most importantly, how well the method performs the functions of prioritizing and setting the following steps: call when promised, prepare a technical and commercial proposal really quickly - just complete the next step on time - and efficiency will increase significantly.

    Another question: how to achieve this?


    And it is advisable to quickly and without significant costs (especially if your company is developing and does not yet have billions in turnover).

    The first thing that comes to mind from this situation is the introduction of a CPM customer relationship management system. There are a lot of such systems on the market - cloud and desktop. Their main purpose is to standardize and automate the sales process.

    Some of their bottom cost fabulous money (such as SAP, Oracle, Sales-Force), designed to integrate with at least call centers, billing, a large-scale telephony hub. Their implementation is a serious challenge even for a very large business, not to mention smaller companies.
    Others, such as Bitrix, Amo-CRM, Megaplan - have fairly budget, and in some cases even free versions.

    Many start introducing exactly with such products. And, often, they immediately face a bunch of managerial problems:
    • The number of "non-selling" functions for each manager is increasing. Indeed, maintaining information and filling out “cards” in the CPM is a longer process than using records in a diary or in an excel-tablet.
    • Information is duplicated. If managers conducted clients in a different way, the transfer of information to the CPM system is a rather voluminous work that will bring the result “somewhere in the future,” but will not add money in a current situation. Phrases such as “I fill out a half day card, instead of selling,” the manager will hear from his managers very often.
    • Automation with independent implementation is practically absent.

    To set up a CPM system with integrated telephony, with automatic submission of applications from different channels (applications from the site, from mail, from calls to a common telephone), with the distribution of applications among managers, with automatic reminders for customers with “one click” - you will have to spend time or money. In different ways, depending on the region, somewhere it can cost from 20,000 rubles, somewhere from 50,000 rubles, somewhere from 200,000 rubles. And this, you see, is already a tangible cost. With all this, it is not a fact that all the functionality you need will be implemented in a cloud-based CPM. For example, a category such as business processes can be flexibly configured only in the boxed version of CPM - and this is at least +200,000 rubles of investments.

    In general, when you start using inexpensive CPM, you get an advanced diary, where you celebrate things for each client. This, of course, is cool, but automation, reducing the time to perform routine processes here does not smell. Not the fact that this will significantly increase managers' productivity and, ultimately, sales.

    Therefore, in the automation market there are a large number of services that perform a narrow task, do not require changes in the company's business processes, are inexpensive and bring quick and tangible results.

    One of these services is Invola.ru, a system of automatic alerts about invoices and commercial offers .

    This service automatically connects, Outlook connects to the mail server (yandex.ru, mail.ru, etc.) for certain keywords registers invoices, commercial offers that managers send to customers. After a certain time (1-3-5 days), if the invoice is not paid, the service offers to send a reminder to the client, thereby stimulating the next step.

    What it looks like from a managerial point of view


    Suppose you set up 100 invoices and commercial offers during the week. Some of them are urgent requests and “hot” customers. As a rule, this is about 20% of all requests. They want the goods right now, and if you have a good offer, they are buying. If not, they say that this does not suit them for a specific reason (expensive, long delivery time, wrong color, etc. ...) For these customers you will immediately receive feedback. And you can use it (make scripts of working with objections, offer a discount ...)

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    The remaining 80% are customers who consider different offers and compare. Most likely, they will not make a decision right away. They will put your offer on a par with competitors and will compare according to different criteria. This is especially true in the B2B sector when dealing with professional buyers.

    This segment goes into the category: “I'll think about it”.

    In order for the transaction to take place, additional touches are required. Letters, calls, personal meetings. Of course, there is a small percentage of customers who call you again to clarify all the issues and complete the transaction. But, as practice shows, not so many. In conditions of high competition there is a high probability that you will simply be forgotten.

    What to do in such a situation?


    1. Enter each request into the CPM system, assign a case “Remind about the exposed KP” and manually call back each client. The result will be. But, another question is that it will take a lot of time, managers will have a language on their shoulder, and one place in the soap ...
    2. The second option - automatically, after a certain time (for example, if you have not been paid the bill within 3 days), send a polite letter to the client with the following content

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    What happens in that case?


    1. If you spoke sincerely, politely, gave him valuable information, but your offer was objectively worse than your competitors, then most likely the client will calmly react to such a letter, remember you, and indicate the reason for the refusal - why he did not buy from you. As you know, this is very important information and a very good “lead”. He treats you very loyally, and, quite possibly, the next time he will contact you again.
    2. It is very likely that you and your managers worked well, but the client ran in and just forgot about you. In this case, having received such a reminder, the client will remember about you, call, and, most likely, complete the transaction. When we worked in the sale of metal cutting tools, there were about 10-20% of them. They immediately raised our sales.
    3. And, of course, there will remain a segment of "random and disloyal customers" who simply monitor the market. For example, we had buyers who simply collected offers for their competitive lists in order to report to management. They had their own supplier, and they did this job “for show”.
      Such requests, as you know, only take time from you and your managers


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    What do we get on the way out?


    Thus, using this system, in one simple method we immediately perform the functions of the next steps (the system automatically reminds you of the invoice and quotation) and the prioritization function.
    Customers who simply forgot about us received extra attention and bought.

    Those who are loyal to us, but haven’t bought due to objective reasons, have given us reasons. Important management information.

    And finally, we very easily identified a segment of random and disloyal customers. What to do with them is up to everyone. Someone will add to the mailing list so that with a small probability to receive applications in the future, someone will simply forget, someone will add to the black list. But, in any case, you will save valuable time.

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    We are not saying that the system replaces human labor. In any case, key customers need to call back in person, go to meetings, love and cherish.

    But for the segment of all other requests, where the check is not so big, you still should not leave the client unattended. As well as not worth spending a lot of precious time.

    Using the Invola system, you can give each client a little more care, remind yourself, stimulate a purchase, collect feedback and receive management statistics about the intensity and efficiency of your work

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