Unleash the potential of your CRM system
Provide a common direction that everyone in sales can work towards, creating a roadmap that not only keeps all team members on track, but ideally also keeps them motivated, focused and productive. War, environmental and energy crises are currently creating many variables. This means that only very short advance planning is possible. In a constantly changing market, your goals must therefore be specific, realistic and achievable as quickly as possible so that you and your team remain competitive.
The correct use of a CRM system will help you to set your goals and achieve them, and I will provide you with suggestions.
Table of contents
How do you define your sales targets correctly?
It is important to check which targets makesense for your team. Not all targets are equally important. For example, if you have a high customer retention rate, you may not need to focus as much on this target, but you may need to focus on increasing your sales volume because your existing customers are not buying enough. Or you look at the average order value and realize that you are actually selling enough, but your margins are too low.
Another decisive factor is what goals you can achieve with the available resources of budget, personnel and technology. Do your employees have too many tasks and too little time? Then they will probably struggle to achieve your planned lead generation via personal contacts. This means that the team will either have to look for lead generation tools or hire more staff - if possible.
A precise analysis of the current situation should therefore be carried out at the beginning. Where do you currently stand, what is going well, what is not? Where do you want to go? And in what timeframe and with what means do you want to achieve your vision?
This is where Dashbord & Reports in your CRM system help to answer open questions. You can also use them to pull in important data from external sources, analyze and evaluate it and then define suitable goals and measures to achieve them.
Use the SMART formula to formulate your goals, as it helps you to be specific. Smart stands for specific, measurable, attractive, realistic and time-bound. It makes a big difference whether your goal is only loosely described as
"increase turnover by€ 250,000"
or is much more tangible with this description:
"All employees in the sales team must acquire at least 3 new customers in the SME sector in the Roof region by the end of the quarter and achieve sales of € 250,000 per new customer".The bonus payment for this is 0.5% per employee."
This gives everyone in the team a clear target that can be measured and compared. And with the fixed bonus, you create motivation to achieve the target.
What sales targets are there?
There are various options that you can use to measure success. To do this, you look at figures at various points in the customer journey and evaluate them in terms of quantity or quality.
Quantitative measurements before a sale (performance)
- Number of visitors, page views & length of time spent on your website
The more visitors the better? Unfortunately, it's not quite that simple. If prospective customers don't find the right content, they will leave your website immediately. The more pages your visitors view and the longer they look at your content, the greater the likelihood that this content will be well received. - Number of downloads, webinar or newsletter registrations via your website
The rule here is: the more the better. Because the more addresses you get, the more promising leads you will have. - Number of agreed consultation appointments
Again, the question arises as to whether more is better. The probability of gaining good leads naturally increases with the number of consultation appointments. However, these appointments also tie up time, which unfortunately does not always pay off. That's why you also need the following figures for evaluation. - Number of opportunities resulting from the consultation appointments
The more the better, because the more opportunities there are, the more deals can result. - Forecast:Amount of expected sales from these opportunities
The level of expectations is not always fulfilled 1:1. But trends can be identified. - Conversion rate:Number of interested parties who become customers
A very good indicator of the effectiveness of sales and marketing! The more customers you have acquired, the better your joint work has been. - Sales cycle:Time span from lead acquisition to conversion into customers
It provides information on how efficient your sales process is and whether something needs to be improved. The longer the process takes to close, the more problematic it is for your company. At the moment, the average timeframe in the B2B sector for complex products or services is 6 to 12 months. Unfortunately, market conditions change just as quickly.
Quantitative measurements after a sale (performance)
- Sales volume
This measures the number of products sold in a given period. - Average order value
This measures the average price per item sold and helps you understand the value of a single sale. - Cost of customer acquisition
This item indicates how much it costs you to acquire new customers. As a rule, acquiring new customers is more time-consuming and therefore more expensive than maintaining existing customers. - Customer retention rate
We examine the number of purchases from existing customers. This allows you to determine whether your regular customers are loyal or just one-time buyers. - Capacity utilization
The capacity utilization rate measures how effectively staff and machines are being used. This can have an impact on your sales targets. For example, if the capacity utilization rate is below a certain threshold, you could increase productivity to achieve higher sales. However, if capacity utilization is too high, this could mean that bottlenecks occur as existing resources are overused. This can lead to slower throughput times and lower quality, which in turn can result in lower sales figures.
Qualitative measurements
As there are different gradations possible when answering questions about quality, the collection and evaluation of data here is somewhat more complex and cannot be presented so easily in a dashboard.
- How satisfied are your customers with your company and your products?
The quality of satisfaction is examined via personal customer meetings, anonymized surveys, evaluations of complaints and the ticket system or evaluation portals. The evaluation is carried out using a scale or by awarding stars. - How is the quality of sales conversations assessed?
Measurable via recordings and evaluations of customer meetings, through personal queries (NPS ratings) or anonymized surveys. The evaluation is carried out in points or percentages and stars are awarded. - How good are your content and strategy for winning new customers?
You can obtain results, for example, by evaluating blog articles directly on your website, by analyzing click and download rates, the playback time of videos, the scroll depth of landing pages (how far users scroll down and read) or likes on social media posts. Attendance figures and feedback from webinars or presentations are also included. - How good is the visibility of your company, how good is the visibility of your brands?
This is easily recognizable via the website analysis (called direct traffic):
How often the name of your company or your products/services has been typed directly into search engines shows how well known you are. Youcan also measure what people are saying about your company or your products/services in social media viasocial listening. - What does our ideal customer look like? Which industries do I generate sales with?
Which contact person is receptive to our offer?
The dashboard shows you the answers to the first two questions. Frequent contacts with a contact person can be made visible to everyone in the CRM with the term "VIP" and thus also marked for sending offers.
What are the advantages of setting more than one target in sales?
Smaller interim goals help to keep people committed to achieving the big overall goal. Track and regularly publish which goals have already been achieved, strengthen the team spirit and encourage them to want to achieve the next goal.
In addition, multiple goals can help to distribute tasks in the best possible way according to the strengths and weaknesses of the team, so that no one is excluded or disadvantaged in the sales process.
How can your employees achieve the defined targets with the help of a CRM system?
A customer relationship management (or CRM) system allows your sales team to stay organized, work effectively, save time, find the right focus and track progress towards goals.
It is important that everyone in the team is sufficiently trained to properly utilize the potential of the software. Equally important is a set of rules that standardizes the way data is stored and processed within the company, otherwise analyses will be distorted.
Functions of a CRM system that help you achieve your goals:
- Cloud CRM solution
The basic requirement for working with a CRM via an Internet browser. Including hosting makes it easier to introduce a CRM system if you are not yet using one. - Central data storage:
CRM systems store all customer-related data and documents in a central location, making them easier to access and manage. Store your written targets as a document that can be viewed by everyone. - Collaboration tools(such as email, video call, chat)
These ensure that everyone in the sales team can communicate with each other in real time from different locations to share ideas, assign tasks or solve problems - which ultimately leads to better results. They are also valuable tools for advising prospects or customers online or presenting products to them. Absolutely crucial for achieving sales targets. - Lead generation and lead scoring
Both are important functions for more effective collaboration between marketing and sales. Lead generation enables the marketing team to identify potential customers, while lead scoring helps the sales team to prioritize. Only the leadsthat are most likely to become paying customers (see the ideal customer above) are processed. This makes it easier for sales to achieve targets. - Customer journey
Marketing, sales and service can track all customer interactions via the central database. This makes it easier to maintain relationships and provide more personalized customer service. If you know who your customers are and what they need, you can make sure you provide them with the right offers. - Assign tags to contacts:
This allows you to mark customer preferences or characteristics to help you create campaigns or make evaluations. For example, you can use tags to summarize groups to get them excited about your offer with email marketing or mark participants of certain events to invite them to further events. - Automations:
By automating repetitive tasks such as suggesting visits or sending reports, sales staff gain valuable time to focus on closing deals and thus achieving the goals they have set. - CRM app for mobile working
With the mobile CRM app, you can also work on the go via mobile devices. Even offline. The next time you connect to the Internet, your drafts are automatically saved as documents in the CRM. - Dashboards:
Analyses provide valuable insights into business activities so that everyone in the team can track the defined sales targets in figures or have them displayed as graphical diagrams. Roles & rights define who can view and edit which figures. - Reports (customizable reports):
Sales teams can create customizable reports to keep track of your progress against targets and develop strategies for improvement when needed.
Conclusion
Take advantage of digital transformation to succeed in sales and start implementing CRM or switching to a more modern system. Your sales team can achieve its goals faster and better by exploiting the potential of the software, i.e. making effective use of the numerous functions.
