sales fundamentals for small businesses
why focus on sales
If there were no sales, there wouldn’t be any customers. And if there are no customers, there is no business to be made. While you may not have salespeople to handle your sales function, sales is possibly the single most important thing to sustain your business, not to mention growing it over the long term.
The way to get there is to provide personalized interactions. People are getting more and more accustomed to personalized interactions with brands, which means you have to personalize to be successful.
grow revenue by managing interactions
Personalization is key to the message you want to convey: you're passionate (this seems to be a key word nowadays, together with obsessed) about your product, and the people you sell to are not in fact just numbers.
Now put all that passion in every prospect interaction you are likely to make: phone, email, social media, face-to-face, text, direct mail, online forms, and more. Multiply each interaction by hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of contacts, and the enormity of the task at hand becomes apparent.
A strong CRM offers you the ability to handle personalization in an easily scalable way, which means you can grow your revenue the right way and within your capacity.
crm comes to the rescue
Fact: Every $1 spent on CRM = $8.71 in revenue. Source: Nucleus Research
On average, a CRM pays for itself almost nine times over. This means a double benefit: you can grow and still maintain a personalized experience for your contacts.
While it's true that CRM works for sales teams, it's designed for any organization that has a sales function (that means basically everyone). In fact, if you don't have the resources to build out a sales team yet, CRM is a critical asset that multiplies your limited human resources by:
introducing efficiency into sales processes so you can save time and money
tracking and organizing numerous client details in segmented lists that mean something to you
helping maintain personalized interactions with leads and clients by having all the useful details in one place
connecting seamlessly with marketing once you are ready to expand your efforts (targeted lead nurturing, lead scoring)
how to implement a CRM successfully
Because CRM is such a powerful addition to a small business's, it's worth considering how it can work for you. Look closely at the opportunities (gaps) in your current system by answering the following questions:
What are your objectives for managing your client relationships? Are you already able to provide personalized interactions in a streamlined way?
How does your current software solution (if you are still doing it all with pen and paper, it still counts!) work for you? What works well and what could improve?
Have you designed your typical client's journey? Does your current system tell you clearly where they are in that journey? Do you know the buying stage of all your leads?
Are you confident that you know how people are interacting with your website?
Are you getting detailed metrics on how your prospects and clients interact with you? Are you able to adapt based on what you know? Is there anything you wish you knew and you currently don’t?
If you aren't happy with any of the answers to those questions, it's time to think about a CRM, something like Salesforce.
