UNLOCKING SALES EFFECTIVENESS

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1 KEYS TO UNLOCKING SALES EFFECTIVENESS

2 It s 5:0 a.m., and you wake up agonizing over two certainties: yesterday was a horrible day for your sales team, and today will be no better. Competitors are eating your lunch and your dinner. Somehow they re connecting with prospects weeks before your team even knows those prospects are in the market. Your team isn t anywhere close to generating the total potential dollar value of their sales, because they have to focus on the transaction instead of the customer relationship when they re scrambling from behind. Your sales people are frustrated. They ve abandoned the CRM system, complaining it s a pain to use and it takes too much of their time away from selling. But you suspect they feel it s a technology designed just to let management keep an eye on their activity. On average, reps spend 75 percent of their time on non-selling activities. When they are selling, it s on price, but that s no way to maximize revenue and bonuses. When they do connect, often they discover they re talking to the wrong customer in the wrong organization, and the size of the deals they are closing are shrinking. What s worse is you don t have a grasp on how to turn things around. You know that the Web, social networks, smartphones and apps have redefined the sales cycle for consumers and businesses. People and companies now are much more sophisticated in researching, comparing and selecting products and services. It s hard for you to believe, but researchers tell you B2B prospects are at least 57 percent of the way through the sales cycle before they talk with anyone from your company. You just can t catch up, much less get ahead of the new buying patterns. You have CRM, but it seems far outmoded for these times. No wonder your sales staff won t use it. They re right; it doesn t help, because it isn t built for today s market. You need Customer Engagement technology designed for the next decade, not the last century. Your technology needs to tell you who and where your best leads are within a company. It needs to be as active in social networks as your prospects are. It needs to bring all your people together from anywhere across the city or around the world to quickly answer questions, prepare proposals and close deals. And it needs to tell you which deals are likely to close this week and this month. It needs to allow you to sleep at night and occasionally wake up with a smile on your face instead of an ache in your belly. 1

3 HOW ONE SALES TEAM GATHERED 450% MORE OPPORTUNITIES While you certainly are not alone in your frustration, some leading sales organizations have found the answer to the issues that kept them up at night. They ve understood they need to switch from outdated CRM that creates more problems than it solves and adopt a true Customer Engagement solution that keeps them smarter than their prospects are. And successful sales teams are not just using social networks; they ve actively joined them and are relying on a Customer Engagement solution to uncover consumer trends, influencers in online communities, and real-time news and developments surrounding prospect companies. Grant Thornton, one of the world s most renowned professional services firms, transformed its sales success when it switched from an old CRM platform to Microsoft Dynamics CRM, the growing choice of sales leaders looking to maximize their team s effectiveness. Grant Thornton implemented Microsoft Dynamics CRM online and began using its dashboards to really understand its business, to gain better insights and to forecast where sales were going. According to the firm s chief marketing and sales officer, Ed Novack, Microsoft Dynamics CRM has changed the game for us. Its InsideView feature provides us great data in terms of the prospect s organizational structure, the executive team and whose preexisting relationships we can best leverage. In just one year, Grant Thornton experienced: 450% boost in opportunities 9% increase in overall wins 6% growth in the average deal size Novack called Microsoft Dynamics CRM a great contributing factor to the success we ve seen. Grant Thornton is part of a rush of companies that have made the switch to Microsoft Dynamics CRM and all of their top sales executives are much more likely to sleep better at night. WHY DOES MICROSOFT DYNAMICS CRM MAKE SUCH AN ENORMOUS DIFFERENCE? Microsoft Dynamics CRM powers productivity. It works in conjunction with Outlook and feels like part of the sales staff s everyday Office tools, with Excel, OneNote and tracking from any Outlook app. It fosters adoption by your sales force, rather than rejection, with its one-click navigation. It turns social networks into a sales channel with the ability to generate leads or opportunities from social posts. It offers a seamless user experience across all mobile devices, so sales people can track and maintain leads on phones, tablets and laptops and you can see their progress by visualizing yours sales data anywhere at any time by reaching into your pocket. 2

4 THREE KEYS TO UNLOCKING SALES EFFECTIVENESS More specifically, Microsoft Dynamics CRM responds directly to the barriers that can hold back the sales effectiveness of your team. Here s what Microsoft Dynamics CRM enables your sales staff to do: 1 REDUCE NON-SELLING TIME...by minimizing administrative work so they can focus in on the right prospects and customers. Mobile sales make every second count while driving productivity by allowing sales staff to work seamlessly across tablets and phones with a business process to guide them. They can use natural-language voice commands to create new records, schedule meetings, set reminders and find information, anywhere at any time. And they work with a screen that s already familiar to them with Customer Engagement for Outlook. The entire social network jigsaw puzzle becomes easy to solve with Microsoft Social Engagement providing the big picture and arranging all the pieces. It identifies leads, opportunities and buying signals based on social posts to help your team connect with prospects at the front end of the new sales cycle model. At the same time, InsideView helps your team pinpoint the right person with the right message within a prospect organization and highlights real-time company and contact data, news and events

5 2 SELL AS A TEAM...with real-time 24/7 collaboration. Putting together a proposal can be exasperating and exhausting with the deadline clock ticking while team members scattered everywhere struggle to find data, images, text and some great new ideas. Microsoft Dynamics CRM lets individuals share and edit documents together, wherever they may be, rapidly gather information from any database, contributor or time zone. SharePoint keeps it all together and up to date, while Skype lets your experts converse by voice, video, IM or online meetings to work as a team, prep and rehearse their presentations. No more big-enough-to-choke-a-cow proposals built by piling on everything imaginable. Presentations can become more focused, more timely and more effective through collaboration. 4

6 IMPROVE VISIBILITY...into sales performance and make better decisions based on better insights. You can t track what you can t measure, and IMPROVE you can t measure VISIBILITY what you can t see. Microsoft Dynamics CRM furnishes not just dashboard analytics but also the ability to drill down to underlying reports to discover new insights. Yes, your staff can monitor their progress against KPIs, but they also can ask questions and interact with data in new ways with natural language queries. Throughout the process, you can monitor sales performance and provide coaching, reinforcement and rewards. You can build your best practices into the technology to help standardize customer engagement and make onboarding of new sales reps a simpler process. 5

7 In all, Customer Engagement through Microsoft Dynamics CRM helps your team stay focused, prioritizing the right customers and making informed decisions. It allows your team to win faster by increasing sales productivity and thereby spending more time with customers. And it builds trust, deepening relationships with customers by anticipating their needs and engaging with them at the right time with the right message. THINGS WON T TURN AROUND UNTIL YOU TRY A NEW DIRECTION When you woke up this morning, you may have debated what to do about your people, but chances are they re the victims, not the perpetrators, of your problems. The real issue may be the tools they re using. Technology that keeps information in silos and makes your people work against each other rather than team with each other has to hurt your productivity, your profitability and your staff. The bottlenecks and barriers they must sidestep contribute to cost of sales and lost sales, ultimately damaging your ability to compete. Lost revenue mounts every week, every month that these inefficiencies persist. It s time to make a change for the better. You ll sleep better tonight with your arms around a Microsoft Customer Engagement solution. WANT TO FIND OUT MORE? Test Drive Dynamics CRM Grant Thorton Case Study 6