How sales consultants can create impactful strategies based on data intelligence from CRM

An integrated approach that combines machine intelligence of CRM with expert human analysis can help overcome the typical sales challenges of modern businesses.

Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, processes are reinventing modern businesses through automation in data capture and intelligent, data-driven strategies. Though initially targeted towards transforming customer relationships, CRM has proven its advantages for use across domains, from employee management, sales and marketing, and training and research sectors. Its popularity has increased with usage across sectors, from manufacturing, BFSI, hospitality, travel and tourism to multi-national conglomerates that operate across sectors and geographies.

Despite this popularity, CRM remains a largely under-utilised process, especially when it comes to driving sales strategies. Most sales and marketing initiatives fail when solely driven by CRM processes, without the support of an expert marketing consultant. This is mainly due to basic shortcomings like untrained and demotivated staff, inaccurate data collection, inaccurate interpretation of CRM data, stalled leads, slow ramp-up rates of new executives, and inaccurate sales forecast, leading to unrealistic targets.

Did you know?

• 78 percent sales leads are lost due to bad followups by executive staff
• 59 percent CRM implementations fail due to poor user adoption
• 89 percent sales executives feel CRM fails to empower them
• 63 percent sales executives lack the right skills and training to optimise CRM tools
• 81 percent organisations have no formal sales coaching programme
• 57 percent sales processes don’t match consumer buying behaviour

An integrated approach that combines machine intelligence of CRM with expert human analysis can be ideally implemented to overcome the typical sales challenges of modern businesses.

An expert, external marketing consultant can help iron out these issues to create not just an intelligent and data-driven sales strategy, but also to train the sale team to optimally utilise CRM resources while adequately developing their skills.

The ideal methodology for an expert consultant would include:

1. Understanding the challenges

Understanding the sales goals from the point of view of the management as well as the challenges faced by on- ground sales teams is the first step to deriving a fruitful sales strategy. Often this step is overlooked, resulting in a different set of expectations among the management and the executive team.

1. Mapping sales targets with business goals

Once the challenges and business goals are understood, an expert consultant can dive into the data treasure of CRM to adequately map the gap using information that might have been missed out earlier. The in-depth analysis, in turn, helps to point out viable solutions to bridge the gap and arrive at a strategy that can connect the sales targets and business goals.

1. Crafting result-oriented strategies

Having a detailed understanding of on-ground challenges and the overall vision of the business growth, a consultant can leverage the full potential of CRM processes to arrive at a well-crafted, data-driven marketing strategy.

1. Effective implementation

Effective strategies are derived only through effective implementation – one of the key factors for success. The predictive analysis from CRM processes helps create a vital difference in effective and efficient implementation of strategies.

1. Empowering teams

For long-term and reproducible results, it is important to empower teams with adequate training of CRM processes. Often this is restricted to training them into data logging and capture, but not data analysis. To attain a self-motivated sales force, empowering them with the full knowledge of CRM and its potential is important – a task an expert consultant can complete.

1. Regular feedback and coaching

Apart from consumer behaviour insights and growth projections, CRM can also be smartly used for assessing employee performance and driving growth. Timely feedback generated through effective monitoring via CRM data can help creating thoughtful training modules and coaching sessions to ensure the motivation, productivity, and, ultimately, sales goals are achieved.

For result-oriented sales and marketing solutions, an intelligent integration of technology and human expertise is vital.

Leveraging CRM expertise with the help of an external consultant who can introduce the correct methodology and systems as well as impart regular training to executive teams will help drive efforts in the right direction to help business goals.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)