The connection between CRM and SFA

In inside sales – also known as remote sales – sales agents and customers don't meet face to face to do business, at least at first. Instead your call center contacts potential leads with the intent of turning them into lifetime customers. Leads that have already become customers in turn can call the business at any time during operating hours, and request the service they need. Inside sales departments succeed by making a large volume of calls, receive a large volume of calls, adequately addressing the needs of prospects and customers, and by keeping track of all the calls and interactions that take place.

A CRM is the system used by companies who sell remotely to handle the large amount of information shared during inbound and outbound calls. These systems collect and record the important data a remote sales team needs. With a CRM, a sales agent will be able to track which of his or her leads have been successfully contacted and also when other leads need to be followed up on.

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. A customer relationship management system tracks all phases of the sales process: sales, marketing, support, ordering, and services.

The part of a CRM that controls and documents the sales process is called Sales Force Automation (SFA). This allows sales professionals to schedule call back appointments and phone meetings, track responses to sales and marketing campaigns, and manage individual sales accounts. The data that the SFA collects during the sales process on leads, customers, and performance will be kept in the Customer Relationship Management database.

The idea behind sales force automation is that when analytical data is shared between departments and those involved in the different stages that sales professionals will be able to ensure that they are productive as possible.

An SFA facilitates successful lead management, and is designed so that no lead will ever be lost in the transfer from lead generation to lead qualification. This allows a sales agent to contact a lead as soon as it comes in. These valuable leads generated from web forms and ad campaigns will never again sit stored in a forgotten computer file where they could be overlooked and ignored. Leads are able to be imported in from a variety of sources including spreadsheets and web captured forms automatically with sales force automation. As those leads are converted into customers sales teams can view trends and analyze those trends in their SFA, which shows how individual employees and sales teams are performing so they can figure out how they could improve.

Sales force automation also consolidates all company information into one accessible place within the CRM. This includes contact information for leads, product purchase orders, and the communication history between clients and sales agents. This information facilitates collaboration across all departments in an organization and aids the effective coordination of sales campaigns and initiatives.

Using Sales Force Automation to track the communication history of individual customers with an organization helps the company to keep their clients happy. Well designed sales force automation systems provide easy templates to be used in creating effective emails or print mailers for customers. They also provide tools for personalization, allowing companies to reach the individual needs of their clients while providing them a good experience with the organization. By tracking communication with individual leads and customers you can avoid the annoying repetitive emails, and all contact with the customer can be rewarding and relevant. SFA also provides information for an organization on whether or not emails sent to contacts are opened by them, as well as how long it took after they were sent for them to be opened.

Using the information gathered by sales force automation, a Customer Response Management system can analyze data recorded and provide reports for employers. These analytical reports will allow a company to know exactly how many calls the whole sales team is making each day, how long each one talks to individual leads and customers, and just what percent of their contacted leads convert into customers. This allows sales managers to accurately make decisions and changes to how their sales team should continue based on their current performance.

Analytical reports also become important in managing an organization’s marketing campaigns. With a customer relationship management system sales professionals can track where the majority of new leads are generated from and which of those new lead bring the company money. If one particular lead source, a lead generation company or ad space on a website, is not producing the quality of leads expected for the business, a CRM will show that in its reporting and inform the company that it should reallocate its resources into a source that will bring higher returns for its investment.

Converting leads and keeping customers happy is what inside sales is all about. A customer relationship management system (CRM) which incorporates sales force automation (SFA) provides remote sales teams the tools they need to do that.

These Software Solutions will Increase your Lead Nurturing Success

Lead generation practices can produce a large volume of leads for a sales team agent to contact. Even with the best of sales reps not every lead contacted becomes a conversion. But not every lead that does not convert is a lost cause. Lead nurturing is the process of preparing contacted, but unconverted leads, into profitable sources of revenue in the future. Unconverted leads become not-yet-converted leads when lead nurturing is implemented.

A potential client needs to think and feel several things about a company before they will purchase their product or service. The lead needs to be familiar with the company and what it does. He or she needs to perceive the company as a group of experts in their field. The lead needs to feel like his or her specific problems are understood. Lastly, the company needs to be well liked enough for the lead to consider doing business with it.

This gradual changing of a lead’s feelings or attitudes cannot be accomplished by a monthly phone call asking if he or she was interested in the product yet. Instead, the lead needs to become comfortable with the organization and the employees there. Much computer telephone integration (CTI) software has been designed to manage the consistent and meaningful communication during the lead nurturing time. These telephony software solutions also incorporate several media formats to be used in the process.

Task management systems, such as an electronic labor force (ELF), manages lead nurturing from one source. These integrate with customer relationship managers (CRMs) to keep track of callbacks, events, and other tasks. These systems also control the various marketing solutions: email, voice broadcast, fax messaging, direct mail, and others.

Fax or email messaging campaigns can be particularly useful during lead nurturing. Faxes or emails can be designed previous to their sending, and cover topics that the majority of leads would be interested in. Many fax or email messaging systems also contain templates made by the host company to help in lead nurturing campaigns. These messages can then be automatically distributed to individual leads that are being nurtured periodically throughout the process. In addition, these emails, or original ones, may be sent by using the straightforward features of the ELF. The interspersion of these text based messages between phone calls from sales reps fosters a feeling of trust with the lead.

These are only a few of the software solutions available to aid the remote sales team to increase sales and customer loyalty through lead nurturing. Sales marketing tactics become more effective and more leads become conversions as lead nurturing becomes an important part of the sales process.

Which sales tools will help your company perform best?

A company’s Customer Relationship Management System (CRM) tracks all of the information a sales team needs to capture about prospective and current clients, but there is more to being a successful salesperson than keeping track of numbers and reports. Vendors that develop and distribute sales automation software have provided many sales tools to enhance the productivity of a CRM and the sales agents using it.

Telephony sales tools vary widely in their functions. Some provide ways to perform the tasks associated with remote sales easily, while others can drastically reduce the amount of paperwork and form filing an agent has to do.

Voice messaging systems are one example of a sales automation tool that speeds up the job of sales professionals. Instead of forcing each agent to wait through long answering machines and leaving their own voice messages – mistakes and all – a voice messaging system allows an agent to leave a pre-recorded message with a simple click of a button. Voicemails then become sales tools. Individual agents are not wasting time that could be used to contact a live lead, but their messages sound more professional since they were recorded (and possibly rerecorded several times) without the pressure of having to get it right the first time. Additionally those messages are still left in their own voices, bringing a personal feel to the automated responses.

An important sales tool to include in a CRM is a permission marketing tracking system. This allows an organization to be in complete compliance with anti-spam and “Do Not Fax” regulations without increasing the workload of their sales department. Permission marketing tracking systems automatically include at the bottom of each fax and email the date and time that permission to send the message was given.

Other sales tools that work in conjunction with the permission marketing tracking system are Do Not Call Maintenance systems. These record “do not call” or “do not contact” requests from contacts directly into the CRM, and records the time and date the request was made.

The most powerful of sales automation tools that incorporate with a CRM are power dialers. These drastically increase the call per hour rate for phone sales professionals by automatically providing leads for them to contact. After uploading a phone list of leads or contacts into the power dialer from the CRM, the power dialer cycles through the list allowing the salesperson to call the next lead with a single click.

Sales tools enhance the already useful and powerful CRM. Many different telephony tools are offered in the industry. They give an organization of any size the resources to be successful.

Embed your dialer into your CRM

A dialer is a type of telephony software that enables a sales agent to call a large volume of leads in a business day. These dialers have many incarnations such as auto dialers, predictive dialers, ratio dialers, and the efficient power dialers. Many dialers operate by calling numerous numbers at once, and they all serve to move a sales rep through a pre-programmed list of leads. All dialers operate at their best when they are used in conjunction with a CRM or ERP.

ERPs (Enterprise Resource Planners) and CRMs (Customer Relationship Managers) create, store and manage important company information, including the contact information on all leads and clients. Some popular providers of ERPs and CRMs include RightNow Technologies, InsideSales.com, Salesnet, and SalesForce.com. The ERP or CRM a company uses becomes a vital part of their sales process. A dialer should be fully integrated to work cooperatively with these systems.

The combining of the data management system with the telephone dialer enables tightly-coupled data management, tracking and analytics with an organization’s telemarketing efforts. The software combination allows quick and easy transfer of important information which powers other telephony business solutions. These include the automatic capturing of leads from submitted web forms, the routing of those leads to the best suited remote sales agent to accept that call, the automatic sending of an email or fax message by a sales agent to a lead while they are on the phone together, and the recording of important follow up tasks and dates associated with each contact.

Some providers of hosted dialer solutions also provide their own CRMs or ERPs. An alternative to a hosted solution that still provides both a CRM and ERP is a company whose telephone dialer can be fully embedded within another company’s management system.

By using a hosted dialer, a remote sales organization gains the telephony power tools associated with the dialer solution, but does not have to develop their own dialer software or download another company’s software onto their computers. Instead the software is housed on the host provider’s network, and accessed by the businesses acting as their clients.

Depending on the combination of data management and telephone dialer systems chosen, reports consistently find that the volume of sales made by any particular remote sales professional can increase three or four times than before. In addition, the ratio of contacts successfully made and contacts that become conversions increase as these telemarketing solutions are used.

How can the use of Toll Free Numbers help telesales?

800 telephone numbers have become a staple in the business world. An 800 number is a toll free phone number, meaning the called party is charged for the call instead of the calling party. This allows customers to call the businesses and organizations they do business with without being charged extra for the communication. Businesses should consider the implementation of toll free numbers when they make a profit from the call in other ways. These profits include collecting fees for technical support, making a sale during the call, or seeing an enhancement in sales because of the implementation of the toll free number.

Including one or more toll free telephone numbers increases company visibility and productivity. There are numerous telephony software solutions that have been designed to help remote sales teams use tool free numbers most effectively.

By linking inbound toll free calls to a lead management CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) incoming calls can be captured. This means that the most relevant, real time information on the caller will immediately and automatically be updated into the CRM. These leads are saved as future prospects for call or email campaigns.

Inbound/outbound call blending telephony software allows sales agents to “double up” on both duties. These sales reps may make outbound calls while they wait to receive an inbound call. This call blending can be additionally enhanced by the use of a CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) system. These solutions often involve pop-ups or pop-screens, windows that open automatically when the inbound call is answered. This immediately displays all relevant information and allows the sales rep to easy update the contacts data in the CRM.

Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) is another business solution that increases the effectiveness of toll free calls. ACD software is known as call routing software, and it automatically forwards incoming calls to the best available agent. Individual agents can be specified as the primary agent for individual toll free numbers or geographic locations. If preferred agents are not available, incoming calls can then be routed to a designated fail-over destination. This could be the company’s general telephone line, an internal messaging system, or a private cell phone.

With the analytic capabilities of an industry standard CRM, an added toll free number can be used to quickly track the progress of a new marketing strategy. The amount of time each call is left on hold and the length of each call can also be monitored and be used to create service standards for inbound calls. Toll free telephony software creates many opportunities to increase customer satisfaction and sales.

All about CRMs and SFAs

In inside sales – also known as remote sales – sales agents and customers don't meet face to face to do business, at least at first. Instead your call center contacts potential leads with the intent of turning them into lifetime customers. Leads that have already become customers in turn can call the business at any time during operating hours, and request the service they need. Inside sales departments succeed by making a large volume of calls, receive a large volume of calls, adequately addressing the needs of prospects and customers, and by keeping track of all the calls and interactions that take place.

A CRM is the system used by companies who sell remotely to handle the large amount of information shared during inbound and outbound calls. These systems collect and record the important data a remote sales team needs. With a CRM, a sales agent will be able to track which of his or her leads have been successfully contacted and also when other leads need to be followed up on.

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. A customer relationship management system tracks all phases of the sales process: sales, marketing, support, ordering, and services.

The part of a CRM that controls and documents the sales process is called Sales Force Automation (SFA). This allows sales professionals to schedule call back appointments and phone meetings, track responses to sales and marketing campaigns, and manage individual sales accounts. The data that the SFA collects during the sales process on leads, customers, and performance will be kept in the Customer Relationship Management database.

The idea behind sales force automation is that when analytical data is shared between departments and those involved in the different stages that sales professionals will be able to ensure that they are productive as possible.

An SFA facilitates successful lead management, and is designed so that no lead will ever be lost in the transfer from lead generation to lead qualification. This allows a sales agent to contact a lead as soon as it comes in. These valuable leads generated from web forms and ad campaigns will never again sit stored in a forgotten computer file where they could be overlooked and ignored. Leads are able to be imported in from a variety of sources including spreadsheets and web captured forms automatically with sales force automation. As those leads are converted into customers sales teams can view trends and analyze those trends in their SFA, which shows how individual employees and sales teams are performing so they can figure out how they could improve.

Sales force automation also consolidates all company information into one accessible place within the CRM. This includes contact information for leads, product purchase orders, and the communication history between clients and sales agents. This information facilitates collaboration across all departments in an organization and aids the effective coordination of sales campaigns and initiatives.

Using Sales Force Automation to track the communication history of individual customers with an organization helps the company to keep their clients happy. Well designed sales force automation systems provide easy templates to be used in creating effective emails or print mailers for customers. They also provide tools for personalization, allowing companies to reach the individual needs of their clients while providing them a good experience with the organization. By tracking communication with individual leads and customers you can avoid the annoying repetitive emails, and all contact with the customer can be rewarding and relevant. SFA also provides information for an organization on whether or not emails sent to contacts are opened by them, as well as how long it took after they were sent for them to be opened.

Using the information gathered by sales force automation, a Customer Response Management system can analyze data recorded and provide reports for employers. These analytical reports will allow a company to know exactly how many calls the whole sales team is making each day, how long each one talks to individual leads and customers, and just what percent of their contacted leads convert into customers. This allows sales managers to accurately make decisions and changes to how their sales team should continue based on their current performance.

Analytical reports also become important in managing an organization’s marketing campaigns. With a customer relationship management system sales professionals can track where the majority of new leads are generated from and which of those new lead bring the company money. If one particular lead source, a lead generation company or ad space on a website, is not producing the quality of leads expected for the business, a CRM will show that in its reporting and inform the company that it should reallocate its resources into a source that will bring higher returns for its investment.

Converting leads and keeping customers happy is what inside sales is all about. A customer relationship management system (CRM) which incorporates sales force automation (SFA) provides remote sales teams the tools they need to do that.

All about Auto Dialers

A keyword search for “auto dialer” on Google Search will find over seven hundred thousand sites. Out of the first fifty sites that Google displays, a quick perusal of the page summaries show that at least ninety percent of them are trying to get you to buy their autodialer. What is this hot item and what do you need to know about it?

An auto dialer's job is to allow just one sales agent to make a large volume of calls quickly and efficiently. When making B2C calls (which stands for Business to Customer) an autodialer will save an immense amount of time for any organization. For an auto dialer to work it must be programmed with a list of phone numbers to call, such as your list of leads. As your business generates leads from its own website or purchases new or old leads from any of the lead generation companies out there (a search of “lead generation company” will give you over sixty thousand sites to explore) they can be fed into the autodialer. The same is true for lists of previous and current clients or leads that you are nurturing. The autodialer will then give these numbers for your sales team to call.

When shopping for an autodialer look for a system that will phone the numbers given to your sales agents with just a click of the mouse. Additionally those sales agents should be able to leave a prerecorded voice message, or send a fax or an email with just another click.

Traditionally auto dialers haven't been used as much in B2B calls (which stands for Business to Business). Businesses are much more likely to have a receptionist or a voice recognition message systems an agent has to maneuver through that would defeat a purely automatic auto dialer or gatekeeper. Now “hybrid” auto dialers are available, which allow the auto dialer to take care of the basic tasks of calling, and call resolution, while giving the sales agent the needed control to successfully contact other businesses.

When shopping those seven hundred thousand search results for an automatic dialer search for one who's auto dialer software can provide these benefits; which enables hands free dialing, displays lead information, displays lead notes, displays lead activities, displays daily call statistics, allows leaving a voice message, allows sending email and faxes, and enables quick data entry.

The purpose of auto dialers and the corresponding auto dialer software is to allow you and your sales team to contact thousands of leads each day. An autodialer has the potential to increase the amount of calls your call center makes 'four times' the amount they are doing calling manually.