“Let me confirm with my national sales head about the most recent additions to the lead pipeline”, the CEO of a SME logistics firm said in a meeting with me. We were discussing about developing high impact marketing collateral's for improving their lead generation initiatives. After trying to reach the National Sales Head for the next 5 minutes, he apologized and said that he will discuss the latest sales figures later. While he apologized, I was smiling in my head about the umpteenth such interaction I had been privy to in the last few months. So here is a company with a sizable annual turnover but no streamlined sales and support processes in place. No wonder, an independent study states that the CRM software solutions market in India is around Rs.1600 crore currently and is only poised to grow exponentially.
Time and again, I have come across SME businesses in India who haven’t considered graduating from excel sheets for managing their sales pipelines. The result is a plethora of excel sheets floating around in emails across the hierarchy and no one has a single view of their communication with the customer. This is where the right CRM solution can change the way you conduct your business for good.
Coming back to my meeting with the CEO of the logistics firm, I suggested them to strongly consider implementing a CRM solution for their sales process. They hired me for evaluating the right CRM solution for them and help in the implementation process. During ongoing discussions with their team, I realized that its not just the sales process which was plagued with inefficiencies but even service requests by clients were mismanaged due to improper documentation and tracking. Hence the search began for a CRM software system which could effectively streamline these processes.
I evaluated Salesforce, Zoho CRM and some local CRM vendors and finally implemented Zoho CRM considering their scalability requirements and budget.Since most CRM Solutions these days are cloud based offerings, implementation isn’t time consuming and SME organizations can start using the service from day one post signing up. To ensure that the sales team is updating the CRM system regularly with their leads, their weekly sales reviews started happening directly from the CRM solution. Infact, the CEO had a view of the complete sales pipeline even when he was travelling and wasn’t able to conduct the sales review in person. Due to real time transparency in the sales pipeline, the top management’s intervention in the sales process increased which ultimately resulted in a 20% increase in sales closure effectiveness in the first month of implementation itself. The CRM solution also helped them improve their customer support process as all the queries were now effectively tracked from origination to closure.
On a recent Monday morning, I got a call from the CEO to discuss some ongoing marketing initiatives. I casually asked him how come he wasn’t busy with his customary Monday Morning Sales review meeting. He replied that those days are passé as he no longer needed the sales team to be physically present for the review post the CRM implementation. I was smiling in my head again. This time for a job well done :)
After reading this article, do connect with me if you think you would be interested in having a discussion on improving your company’s sales, marketing and service processes :)
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