Introduction:
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology designed to optimize the customer interaction and helps in building superior customer relationships, thereby driving more sales.
The use of CRM in your business is an effective way to convert your leads into sales. Just purchasing a CRM solution alone doesn’t work. You need to carefully implement and deploy the CRM strategies in order to reap the maximum benefit.
Effective ways to convert your leads into sales using CRM:
Everyone should know that not all prospects become customers. The reason behind this is they have been pushed through the sales funnel. The conversion process needs some serious nurturing and assistance. Listed below are some of the effective ways you need to follow to convert the leads into sales using CRM.
1.Don’t waste time
Businesses need to remember that you can’t make the leads wait. If you do so, the prospect interest might get decreased and will eventually look for some other substitute products.
Hence it is important to have some standard techniques and procedures to deal with new leads.
Most of the businesses use customer support or send web forms to the leads mail to get in touch for more information. In today’s environment, an increasing number of firms realize the importance of customer relationship management. CRM takes account of all the leads that the company gathers from multiple sources.
2.Find out the qualified leads
The business needs to focus their sales and marketing efforts on the qualified leads. This way you can save a lot of time, effort and resources. You need to collect extensive information about the leads which will help to identify the good quality leads. CRM tools will help in qualifying the leads by helping the sales and marketing teams to understand the various qualification metrics. This might include open rate of mails, click rate, viewing and downloading content, signing up for free trial or scheduling a demo.,etc You need to invest in a good quality CRM that will help you with lead qualification in an organized manner.
3.Sales teams need to equip themselves
The sales team needs to focus on two categories of customers, one is current clients and the other for new customers. The sales team is bombarded with many tasks such as scheduled calls, deadlines, targets and updating information. CRM tools allow optimizing the operations of the sales team and minimize the manual effort significantly.
4.Keep the leads warm:
Even if you contact the prospect after five minutes of signing the web form, he or she may not be ready to show much interest even after signing up. You need to keep them warm while on the call. You need to ask if they are interested to be included in the mailing list. This is the first step of nurturing them and letting them know that you care. If you keep them informed, they will definitely reach out to you.
5.Monitor the sales pipeline:
With CRM in place, you can view the sales funnel which provides you with the insights about the prospects. You will be able to gather data on how those prospects are progressing throughout the funnel. The sales team will know where to concentrate their efforts in order to move them down the funnel. The sales pipeline makes it easier for the sales team to evaluate and make decisions promptly.
6.Offer certain incentives:
The businesses can offer freebies or limited time offers in order to attract the customers. The freebies you offer don’t have to be of great value or too excessive. The customers will inquire and show some interest in the company’s offering if there is a limited period discount.
7.Remind them often:
If your product or service is likely to increase your prospect’s ROI. you need to remind them often. You have to explain about the benefits of your solution and how your solution can positively impact their business and potentially increase their ROI significantly.
8.Have a FAQ page in the website:
Before converting or making a purchase, the leads will have many questions about the product or service that needs to be answered. You need to definitely have a FAQ section on the website which will be helpful for the leads to go ahead with the product/service. You need to work together with the sales and customer support team and jot down the commonly asked questions. This will help in framing the FAQ section in your website.
9.Set a time limit
You can set a time limit, say if your lead has not responded even after a month. You can send them a message stating, it’s been 30 days since we heard from you, if you are interested please get in touch with us. This will prevent wasting time and effort on leads who are not interested.
10.Do a follow up:
With CRM, you will be able to follow up with the leads. You can ask the leads if they have any questions or doubts before making a purchase. This is one effective way of converting leads into sales. Sometimes a simple follow up is all that you need for conversion rate to increase significantly.
11.Make a effective marketing strategy
CRM helps you plan, track and manage the marketing campaigns and you will be able to see the success rates. This way you can effectively track and manage the marketing campaigns. CRM automates all the marketing efforts and you can devise the right analytical strategy in order to reap good results.
12.Access to lead data
The teams from different departments can access the lead information in the CRM software. CRM with mobile access has allowed the teams to stay online and respond to the leads queries and complaints. This will help to convert more leads into sales opportunities.
Conclusion
CRM solutions have helped businesses to streamline their operations in an effective way. With CRM, you will be able to store the lead information, observe the lead behavior and devise strategies to convert them to increase the sales numbers.
