The Sales Force Automation First Approach

February 05, 2021
Mike Smith
mike@hotprospects.com

When evaluating CRM software, many platforms fall short when considering the sales process and any automation that can create a more cohesive sales team. CRM platforms can consist of many different tools and helpful work arounds for everyday lead management, but many customers are looking to increase the success of their sales team. Companies are looking to other places than CRM to help automate their sales process. That solution can actually be more costly than a CRM platform, and still comes without the true ability to scale up. In the end, you get a mishmash of different third-party API calls that may or may not be working on that specific day for whatever reason. These band-aids that built your sales process will ultimately have different costs, different thresholds, and different limits on the calls. When one API goes down or doesn’t work properly, the whole process can be compromised. It would be much nicer to have the sales force automation built into the same CRM software that stores all the data.

The Hot Prospects CRM workflow and design started with a sale process first approach. This allowed us to really concentrate on how a sales team would utilize the tools within the platform to help increase sales productivity. The many revisions and additions to the software have ultimately resulted in changes to increase productivity having been found through real client usage.

This means we know the process works when used correctly, and as with all CRM software platforms, it’s only as good as the data being provided by the users. A high adoption rate from all parties would be mandatory for success. The sales team, the managers, the business owners, all would need to be participating in order to take advantage of the knowledge available. It is a type of knowledge that flows from the bottom up. If sales staff and others engaged in the sales process don’t enter the data, then the numbers will not reflect a realistic pipeline for the business owners. Forecasting the future is but a dream without real solid data to rely on.

Sales Steps and Actions: Building out the sales process.

• The first step is to plan and build out your sales process based on the various steps the business currently uses. By creating Steps and a list of their associated Action(s), selected combination allows us to build a sales history connected to the lead.
• Second step is to make sure the sales staff are providing the correct information. Each time the lead has a step & action added, an Event is generated within the platform. Emails will notify both users engaged in the Action. iCal files can also be attached to provide additional access to Outlook Calendars or Google Calendars.

• The third step is really more of a checking over the results and reviewing the pipeline to make sure things are still on track. As a lead goes through the sales process, specific numbers that are assigned to the Step and Actions will be used to build out the pipeline and forecasting mechanism displayed within the Dashboard(s).