Friday 28 April 2017

Four Smart tips to improve your direct sales outcomes


Do direct sales still matter or is it just a part of the old system that needs to be removed.
In most organizations, direct selling remains the significant part that determines the ultimate turnovers. If you can master the direct sales process, it will instantly get you more customers and higher revenues.
If you get really good at direct selling, it means lesser hardships at achieving the targets. It also helps you build and nourish better customer relationships. However, being bad at direct selling will lead to directly opposite results.
In this blog, we will look into the different aspects and characteristics of the direct sales process.
Direct Selling is a Prime customer acquisition channel
Whether you’re selling a physical product or software, the direct sales is an important part of your business. Even as your initial touch point with the prospect is through email or website, you will probably need a direct meeting to actually realize the final transaction.
This keeps the direct selling as a critical phase for all your sales funnels.
If you aren’t good at this phase of your sales process, it’s likely that you will suffer a significant drop-off at this part of the sale.
Also, the direct selling is a combination of multiple skills. Typically this includes negotiation, presenting a convincing demo or some other closure defining activity. Otherwise, you are likely to end-up watching the majority of your sales opportunities fail immaturely and bite the dust.
For this, you need to be attuned to realize all the direct selling opportunities that come your way.
Figure out a direct sales approach
In the world of online transactions, you could use elaborate sales funnel and multiple touch points to close a particular sale. But the direct sales take a fast-lane approach that need speedy decision making.
Any sense of inadequacy or inefficiency could easily puncture your chances of closing those sales opportunities. Usually, the direct sales reps need much more data to actually help you close the deals.
This makes the speed and efficiency of decision-making to be the significant aspects of your sales approach. You should be able to tweak your individual decisions to utilize the available opportunities.
A direct sales app like a mobile CRM can help you manage the sales activities at the desired efficiency. This helps you make all the necessary decisions through a single unified platform.


This helps you eliminate point of indecisions or time-lag throughout your direct sales process. The unified system also gives you easy access to product features and consequently better chances of deal closures.
Personalize and manage the customer meetings
In the present scenario, you should deal with an increasingly well-educated customer base. The customers should be well-aware about available market options and the pricing ranges.
By personalizing the existing relationships, you can easily combine and manage the existing relationships.
A normal business process facilitates numerous arenas to collect and personalize your customer relationships. The role of the business would be to utilize and leverage all these numerous touch points.
According to pitneybowes, these are the possible touch points to collect data and build customer relationships.
If you can properly utilize these touch points, it will lead to better customer relationships and engagement. It’s also a resourceful opportunity to discover revenue generation avenues.
Scaling the number of direct sales meetings
In a competitive arena, the number of sales closed to the meetings attended is always falling.
This requires you to consistently increase the number of sales meetings attended during each day. You should also get your best foot forward in these situations.
This problem could affect the entire organization vertical.
For example, the wall street journal shows that an average CEO spends 18 hours a day on meetings and 20 hours on miscellaneous activity every week.

You can multiply these numbers by 10X for an average sales guy where he needs to collect and figure out all the aspects.
At the end, this limits the ability to efficiently scale the number of meetings. A better daily meeting planner system lets you manage and arrange the meetings throughout the day. You can also radically increase the number of meetings attended each day.
Manage and organize daily negotiations
Typically, the sales negotiations are a normal part of all sales deal. A successful sales negotiation program lets you influence and create multiple opportunities – deal margins, up sell and cross sell opportunities, total product customization etc. It turns multiple aspects of the deal making to your advantage.
As most of the live negotiations are a part of direct sales, you should be equipped to close every deal.
In a successful negotiation, you need to constantly add data and successful deal factors that lead to closure. If you can lead to particular closures, you can accelerate the deals. Otherwise, it will face constant troubles. It may also require a flow of information that facilitate faster decision making.
This requires the direct sales person to come-up with conclusive decisions at the earliest. This is true for small and large organizations alike…
A mobility-based CRM platform helps you streamline multiple parts of the decision making. This also helps you lay-out the process flow that leads to individual decisions.
Take away:-
The difference between closing 10% – 5% of your sales meetings are usually worlds apart in terms of the final generated revenue. A good direct sales team will be able to discover and convert the right opportunities. This is usually achieved by the most agile and versatile sales teams.

Tuesday 4 April 2017

How Mobile CRM Can Benefit Your Startup Business


India’s startup ecosystem continues to increase at a rapid pace. Now we have nearly 19,000 technology-enabled startup companies, according to Economic-survey 2015-2016. However, despite the innovative ideas and groundbreaking projects, many businesses struggle to survive the competition, and many are eventually forced to shut down.

Accepting the challenges, many companies are now using Customer Relationship Management software and getting wonderful benefits out of it.

As per the latest survey by Trackvia, successful implementation of CRM software can boost sales revenue by 41% for per salesperson and can enhance customer retention by up to 27%.

Office-based CRM systems are powerful tools for small businesses, but once you get outside the office, you will be completely disconnected from the affluence of your CRM tools.

That is the way sales-based startups face maximum problems regarding information management, client communication and team collaboration. Opening up your laptop to log in to a casual chat with your client is not a convenient option all the time, especially when you are out for a meeting.

Having your sales team equipped with a mobile CRM can benefit you to a large extent.

Quick facts about mobile CRM

  • Not only is the CRM industry growing at a rapid pace, but Mobile CRM is expected to grow by 500%, with more than 50% of business rolling out or piloting mobile CRM. (Source- Gartner)

  • Mobile access to a CRM increases sales force productivity by an average of 14.6% with a further 3 in 10 mobile CRM users reporting productivity improvement of more than 20%. (Source- Nucleus Research)

  • Companies that have mobile CRM enabled had a much higher percentage of reps achieving their sales quotes. (Source: Super Office)




Selling on-the-go

CRM software is nothing but the backbone of a sales team. They need to access different marketing and sales tools, even if they are outside the office. Without a mobile CRM this could not have been possible at all.

Going out for a meeting with a mini-office in your pocket will surely give a higher level of confidence. You can carry out the selling process any time, no matter where you are.

All time access to updated information

Imagine the common scenario of a company with a decentralized sales force – while attending a meeting you suddenly need some information to show your client. You called your team members, and asked them to send a mail attached with the documents, and waited a long time expecting to receive the mail from the office.

Logically, you simply can’t waste your time like that. It certainly leaves a bad impression on your client and for this you may not get your expected closure.

With a mobile-enabled CRM system you can access updated client information, product information, brochure and everything in just a click.

Besides, the information comes with an organized form, making things easy to figure out. And the best part is that its limited access completely confirms the information security.

Real-time reporting

If you or one of your sales team members completes a transaction on the meeting site with a client, you may need to return to the office to update the MOM or transaction details into the system later on. This type of delay slows down the process.

While running a startup company, you need a superfast selling process. With a mobile-enabled CRM, you can simply update all records from your smartphone or tablet while you’re there with the customer. These real-time updates will show up on the dashboard, so that your co-salespersons and the executives can instantly know about the work progress.

Shorter sales cycle

From the previous points, by all means a CRM can successfully cut down the sales cycle, rescuing you from the exertion of long sales cycle. It streamlines your team efforts with technological tools to prevent you from unnecessary delay.

Collaboration on the peak

A startup company always needs a fully organized and coherent sales team. They need a platform, where they can chat, share, report and make big decisions instantly.

CRM gives you the right opportunity to enhance your team collaboration. With its inbuilt chat facility, you can share anything with your team, be it an image, video, audio or a document. Form a group or go for one-to-one interaction – with your CRM you can resolve any team or client related issues immediately. You do not need to call for a meeting or individually call people and ask their problems. You can interact with multiple employees directly through your mobile CRM app.

[Find more on team collaboration, with mobile CRM – 5 Applications of Mobile CRM to Achieve 5x Sales Results]

Also, it gives you the opportunity to maintain and track the performance and work progress of your employees. 

Most importantly, your CRM tools will always take care of your data privacy.



Ultimate customer engagement 

With your CRM in your pocket, you can contact your client whenever you want. The integrated social networks and other systems will help you to answer the customer queries, mails, social media comments and feedback.

By giving prompt response to customers’ inquiries and feedback, you can achieve remarkable customer engagement and brand loyalty.

Conclusion 

With the upswing of mobile computing, cloud-based data networks and smart devices, companies now understand that anything that can be done digitally in office can also be accomplished effortlessly on the go. So, why not with your CRM?

Having a Mobile CRM is no longer optional.

Utilizing mobile CRM you can manage a prospective business in your sales funnel. You can make opportunities to define the prospect of your business, manage pipelines and related activity circles, and make certain the accuracy of sales forecast.