How to convert your leads into sales with these five CRM features

If you’ve been in business for long enough, you know that sales are one of the key drivers to growth, and you can’t even stay afloat without sales. No matter if you’re selling products or services, you need good sales processes for your business to survive and thrive. And the keyword here is the process. If you don’t have the right process, you’re not going to ever have your sales machine fine-tuned.

If your sales team, no matter how big or small it is, if it needs redundant tasks that you need to continually do each and every single day, like filling out spreadsheets and manually scheduling calls with prospects, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity. From the moment you have a new lead in your pipeline to the moment you close a sale, you need to have your sales process nailed to the T and automate as much as you can so, that way, you can generate the most revenue per individual.

Now before I dive in on how you can maximize your sales, I want to let you know that this video is by Pipedrive and is sponsored by them, and funny enough, even if they didn’t sponsor it, I’ve used Pipedrive for so many years, I would’ve mentioned them in this video anyway. So let’s dive right in. I have a ad agency, and in my ad agency, it’s spread throughout the world.

We have dozens of people working in sales in many different countries. Heck, if I had to guess, we probably have close to 100 sales reps globally. Literally, we’re probably getting close to 100 sales reps globally. Just in my S&B division at NPA, I think we have 48 sales reps, and we’re trying to hire another 12 or 13.

And if there’s one thing that’s allowed my business to grow from nothing in 2018 to one of the fastest-growing companies in 2021, according to “Inc.

Magazine” in the United States, we’re number 21, it is sales. My teams know exactly what to do at each stage of the sales process, and we rely primarily on one tool to help us streamline that, and that is our CRM. Research by Nucleus in 2011 shows that the average return on investment on CRM is 8 dollars and 71 cents for each dollar spent. That’s massive. That’s almost 11 years ago, when CRM was used by just a handful of enterprise companies, plus the CRM solutions back then weren’t as good as they are now.

So you should expect that a CRM helps you even more now than it did back then, because it has so many more features to streamline and automate yourselves.

Now the industry has matured so much, to the extent that you can pretty much streamline and automate most of your sales process, which means that your ROI should, if I had to take a guess, be double that. Today, I’m going to walk you through five key CRM features that allow you to convert your leads into sales in the most efficient way possible. I’m also recommending Pipedrive as your go-to solution for all the features that I’m going to show you, as that’s the system that we use in some of our companies, and I see my sales reps’ data from all my local and international teams in one platform, which makes things simple. There are essentially five things that you need to look at when choosing a CRM.

Pipelines. You need a way to visualize your entire sales process and how deals are moving from stage one to stage two to stage three, et cetera, until they close. Heck, even until they upsell and you can even get more money out of that customer.

Two, automations. Your sales process may be very good at converting leads, but if most of your sales activities are done manual, you won’t be able to scale, and people are more expensive now than they ever have been, especially since the great resignation.

So you want to make sure that you automate as much as possible, so, that way, your people are the most efficient. They can spend most of their time selling and closing deals. Three, lead management.

Across all your digital touchpoints with clients, you need to make sure that you capture leads through Live Chat, web forms, chatbots, and every single way that you can imagine, and make sure that it integrates within your sales process. Four, reporting.

As a business owner, you got to know your numbers, and if you have to scramble through a few different platforms in order to know what you need, you’re in trouble.

Five, integration. If your CRM is in a silo that doesn’t communicate with other platforms you use in your business, such as Zoom calls or Slack for team communication, or even Asana for task management, you’re missing out on efficiency and productivity. So let’s go over them one by one. Pipeline.

Having pipelines help you map out different stages of your existing sales process and move leads through each stage. The more important thing is that your sales team is focused on the actions that they need to take in order to keep moving the leads through the pipeline. Pipedrive allows you to develop a clear understanding of your sales momentum and priorities and refocus your efforts accordingly. In Pipedrive, you can add deals, assign the monetary value, win probability, and expected close date. Beyond that, you’ll be able to organize and track your pipeline by stages.

You can customize the stages to suit your sales cycle, create team pipelines, and even filter results by rep or stage and have one for each member. In other words, you can slice and dice your data any way you want, and even color code different things, so, that way, different deals draw more attention and stand out.

And as for automation, your sales team shouldn’t be spending too much time on repetitive tasks, things like sending emails to leads or scheduling follow-up activities one by one, or even assigning statuses, can become a big time sink. With Pipedrive, you can automate a few critical tasks that’ll make a real difference in your team. You can send personalized emails automatically.

Pipedrive will also use the information you add to your leads to automatically personalize the interactions that you have with them by email, and you can automate repetitive sales tasks. When a lead moves through your pipeline, you can automatically create and schedule activities like sales calls, email follow-ups, and even proposal writing with tools like Sales Docs, which is part of Pipedrive, and external tools like Better Proposals. You can be reminded about critical sales activities and doing that admin work of scheduling your sales-related tasks can be time-consuming, and you can even make some bad mistakes.

Pipedrive can send you reminders of all the important things that you need to do with each lead so that you can focus on the actions you need in order to close a deal. Now let’s dive into lead management.

Pipedrive has a suite of tools and functionality to help you manage your leads. You have a centralized Leads Inbox that helps you declutter your CRM and improve your presales communications with prospects. Once a lead is qualified, you can easily convert it to a deal and move it to your pipeline. When it comes to lead generation, Pipedrive offers two of the best lead generation methods that I’ve known today. Web Forms allows you to collect leads from your website traffic and import them into your pipeline, your contacts, or your Leads Inbox.

It’s your choice. You’ll also receive a email notification so that you can follow up with a lead while they’re still hot. And that’s the key.

You want to follow-up as quickly as they come in. Now, Pipedrive’s Live Chat and chatbot will help visitors with a high purchase intent by engaging them through a live conversation.

The chatbot can be customized to ask and answer specific questions, reply with specific messages, and even prequalify leads that come through your website. The Live Chat will assign chats to your salespersons right away if the chatbot considers that lead to be qualified. Now, when you want to talk about reporting, just having data about your sales isn’t enough. You’ve got to be able to extract valuable insights from your data. You’ll want to understand which products are driving the most results, why your closing rates falter, and even identify winning secrets from your top sales reps.

Pipedrive reporting is focused on translating your data into actionable insights. You can customize your report to meet the needs of your business, do revenue forecasting, and set goals to measure your performance against. Now, Marketplace is one of the coolest things about Pipedrive. It’s the fact that it integrates with a lot of other apps that you may be using in your workflow. You can expand the capabilities of your Pipedrive account by adding apps that connect with other popular services like Slack or Trello or Zapier, or even Gmail.

So the takeaway for you, for salespeople, a CRM is a fantastic asset in helping to follow-up on leads, and a CRM platform with allow you to monitor your client records, keep track of multiple conversations, and process follow-ups.

Pipedrive with give you the best features and capability that you need from a CRM in a super easy-to-use interface and pretty much automate all the lower-value activities for you so that your team can focus on closing..

Source : Youtube

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