How Sales Engagement Software Increases the Benefits of Your CRM

A report on B2B sales evolution found that a whopping 93% of B2B sales teams are not fully utilizing their tech tools.

After paying so much money and spending time on vendor selection, purchase, and deployment — why wouldn’t sales teams be getting the most use out of them they could?

• A few factors may contribute to this; among them:
• Some software seems more complicated than it’s worth
• Fully implementing newly required processes takes too much time

If the team is meeting their numbers, it may be tempting to let small process issues fall under the radar. But eventually it will catch up with you, especially when it comes to your CRM software.

Your CRM should be a single source of complete information about your team’s engagement with prospects and customers, but it’s only as good as the data entered into it. A Salesforce report found that top performers are more likely to automate repetitive tasks and more closely track deeper customer insights.

That’s why adding a sales engagement platform to your tech stack can be a benefit to your team’s workflow and performance, not slow them down.

The right sales engagement software can actually make your CRM more effective, by automating activity logging and decreasing the complexity of ensuring full and complete data.

Benefits of Using a CRM

Early-stage startups often keep their tech stacks pretty slim, scrappily making tools work for use cases they were never meant to solve. That spreadsheet is only going to work for so long.

That’s where a CRM — or, customer relationship management solution — comes in.

Leveraging a CRM to house and share relevant information around your customer relationships becomes more and more important as your business starts to scale.

Here are some of the specific benefits organizations get from implementing a CRM:

Provides a source of truth

A good CRM will provide you a place to keep the information you need around sales, marketing, and support — all in one place. When your entire team is working from the same information, it eases collaboration and enables smooth handoffs among your team members.

Access dashboards and reports

With your data in a CRM, you can run customizable reports that help you identify opportunities, best practices, sales trends, and more. Team members can also keep important data at their fingertips with custom dashboards.

Provide consistency in engagement

When everyone in your organization has access to clean, complete data — including who talked to whom about what and when — the buyer and customer experience becomes more consistent across departments.

Why Salesforce is a Top CRM

Salesforce is one of the most widely used CRMs in the market and played a big role in pioneering SaaS (read about their End of Software campaign from 2000) and cloud-hosted software.

Today, more than 150,000 companies use Salesforce to manage customer relationships and other aspects of their business, and thousands of other software solutions integrate with it.

Flexibility to meet your business needs

Many CRMs — and often, SaaS software in general — are relatively inflexible, forcing users into a one-size-fits-all implementation. Salesforce provides the flexibility needed to adapt to any number of use cases across industries.

Scalability to grow with you

Because of Salesforce’s flexibility, you don’t have to worry about outgrowing it. Salesforce powers some of the largest companies in the world, but it’s not just for the enterprise. If you’re anticipating growth, Salesforce can support you from the ground up.

Customizable features through AppExchange

The Salesforce AppExchange marketplace hosts more than 5,000 solutions to extend Salesforce’s capabilities. Both free and paid apps are listed on the exchange, from marketing and sales apps to DevOps and data backup.

Common CRM Mistakes

Every technology requires active participation and concerted efforts toward onboarding and continuous training, but the best tech will make that easier — not add complexity. Your CRM, particularly one with the power and customization of Salesforce, is no different.

Missing or incomplete information and data

Ask a salesperson what they hate most about their jobs and you’ll frequently hear, “Updating the CRM.” That’s why they’re often so full of inaccurate or incomplete data. If you can’t trust the data in your system, you won’t be able to trust the insights you glean from it.

Lack of integration with other systems

It’s important to integrate your CRM with systems and tools you already have in your tech stack. Your CRM will be most valuable when you combine information across teams and ease the process of data transfer.

Inconsistent processes across teams/team members

It’s important to train team members not just how to use the CRM, but how it should be used for your specific sales processes. Make this a part of every team member’s onboarding and hold regular refresher trainings, too.

Boost Salesforce Effectiveness with Sales Engagement Software

To get the most out of your CRM, you have to achieve these things:

• 100% buy-in from your team
• 100% active participation

That’s easier said than done. But a sales engagement platform can often streamline and/or automate some of the processes that can make working in a CRM so time consuming.

See everything in a single place

Seeing a prospect’s information and engagement history all in one place makes it easier to personalize your conversations; it also saves the time of toggling back and forth among tabs trying to find all the relevant information you need.

Cross-functional alignment

If your marketing team calls one of your at-risk accounts to ask for a case study, you know how important it is to be able to share information cross-functionally (unless you want constant phone calls from marketing). But it doesn’t just keep you safe from big snafus — it can also give marketing more data on how messaging is being received.

Personalize outreach

When it’s easier to connect your engagement metrics with your CRM data, you can develop a more insightful view of your ideal customer profile, what kinds of content provide the highest value, and more.

Take advantage of automation

The time it takes to track activity within your CRM, enter notes, and create compelling communications isn’t insignificant. Sales engagement software can automate many of the repetitive, manual tasks sales reps are on the hook for — and that means saved time on their end and better data and reporting for you. Plus, you can create automated sales cadences with customized rules to streamline the outreach process.

Get the Most Out of Your CRM

Salesforce is a top CRM in the market, and has been for decades. It has the flexibility to meet your business needs, the scalability to grow with you, plus customizable features throughout to match your sales processes. But many organizations aren’t reaping the full benefits of this powerful software.

From missing or incomplete data, to inconsistent processes or complexity due to lack of seamless integrations — whatever the reason, you need more out of your CRM than that.

Boost the effectiveness of your CRM with the right sales engagement platform, and all those things become easier. Everyone will be able to work from a single pane of glass with access to the information they need. Sales reps can personalize outreach while still drawing from templates and pre-set cadences — and automation makes all these processes simpler and more seamless.

Find out how Sellular’s sales engagement platform can help you make the most out of your Salesforce CRM implementation today.