This is a guest blog post by Krish Ramineni, Co-Founder and CEO at Fireflies.ai.
Productivity is the golden ticket of the modern era, especially for sales professionals. The pressure to deliver revenue has never been higher than it is today. With mounting tasks and distractions seemingly everywhere, it’s easy to lose track of your daily and long-term objectives.
Nobody wins when sales reps spend only a third of their time on revenue-generating activities – 36.6% to be precise.
In the era of productivity, nothing is more inefficient than a system that forces professionals to spend almost 65% of their work hours on tasks that don’t support their core objectives.
The same InsideSales study also reveals that most sales reps spend as little as 18% of their time managing client relations. This means there’s a high probability that you’re not even seeing the full value of everything Zoho CRM has to offer because your time is being eaten up by mundane tasks.
It’s not acceptable anymore. We need to find a better system that helps increase productivity and efficiency.
This is why many teams (like the ones behind Zoho CRM and Fireflies) are making it their life’s work to power your life’s work. With Fireflies, you can free up multiple hours each week, leaving you with more time and money to focus on your selling game.
Let’s dive further into Fireflies and its seamless integration with your Zoho CRM environment.
Turn down the dial on sales roadblocks
For professionals in any domain, smaller teams offer several advantages over larger ones. Things get done more quickly with less gatekeeping and bureaucracy, thus benefitting the collective organization. However, the downside to this is that workflows in small teams can be difficult to manage.
In smaller teams that work effectively, each member is more agile than the average professional, taking on greater responsibility to keep the flow of data moving without loss. Since time is so much more precious for small businesses, it becomes vital to minimize delays between the steps of this information-sharing process.
For sales professionals, this usually means individuals taking on a greater share of the workload, ramping up the number of calls made on a given day. With more leads and prospects to nurture, being part of a smaller unit almost guarantees that the amount of information you need to keep track of will be unmanageable without the right tools.
Unfortunately, smaller teams also tend to have smaller budgets, which means that it's difficult to access every helpful tool on the market. The ones you do invest in will be determined by the value they add to your process. If they aren’t saving time, cutting costs, or making your job easier in some tangible way, they’re not worth the investment.
Get 11 hours a week to sell more
Keeping track of dozens of phone calls and meetings each week isn't easy, but it’s an imperative part of every sales professional’s job. Fireflies uses AI technology to help you automatically record and transcribe those conversations, push call activities to Zoho CRM, and see actionable tasks based on dialogue (read more about how Fireflies works here).
The best part is managers have complete visibility into how reps are selling, what they are saying, and how they are handling objections. In addition to the added productivity, Fireflies serves as an excellent coaching platform for managers to review calls and provide training on the spot.
A tool like Fireflies that gives you more selling time each week is well worth its cost because of the associated financial advantages. Assuming you spend 23% of a 48-hour week on administrative tasks, that’s 11 more hours to make pitches, close deals and ramp up your commissions.
By saving more than 44 hours each month, you could conceivably shorten your sales cycle by five days (60 days a year), letting you meet with 16-17% more prospects. With a strong close rate, you could conceivably boost your sales figures and income by at least 10%.
The savings factor: cost, time and coaching
One of the biggest challenges that sales professionals face is keeping track of meetings and conversations with leads and prospects. While it’s important to know what was said, remembering and organizing that information requires much more time than the average sales rep has time for. That’s why you should outsource that task to a professional transcription service, right?
Wrong.
Aside from the obvious confidentiality and security concerns of sharing call recordings with a third party, there’s the staggering cost of using a transcription service. Fees for transcribing 1,000 minutes of a two-person conversation range from $300 for generic machine service with 60-minute delivery to $1,000 for human service with 24-hour delivery.
Fireflies provides the same service for a fraction of the cost with any number of speakers. You’re assured near-human-quality transcription powered by natural language processing that’s free of error, with virtually instant delivery (within minutes).
That means you lose no time moving forward with the next steps. With savings of more than 80% on average, you can afford to transcribe any and all sales conversations – follow-ups, cold calls, interviews– and still free up plenty of your budget. More call coverage also means having better visibility into every conversation as a sales coach. A human transcriber wouldn't be getting you that.
All this is augmented 2x when you consider the advantages of integrating Fireflies with Zoho CRM!
Link it with Zoho CRM
Docurated conducted a study in which 84% of sales professionals cited content search and utilization as a key area for productivity improvement, yet only 35% of related initiatives fell under that domain. This makes you wonder why there’s such a big gap between demand and supply.
Zoho CRM enables you to access customer data and insights from a central location. This helps you automate sales processes, track deals and much more to easily improve your sales productivity. Without technology like Fireflies, you risk losing much of the information you need to make this happen; information you’ve worked so hard to collect.
When you integrate both apps, you start seeing amazing results. Once you finish a meeting with Fireflies dialled in, you’ll see the call recording and transcript in the Fireflies dashboard for review and playback. These same audio and text files are then automatically sent, along with activity notes, to your Zoho CRM interface.
This advantage is highly understated. No sales rep enjoys data entry, no matter how vital it may be to individual and collective success. It’s a menial task that doesn’t make use of the finesse, charm, or social intelligence that sales professionals possess. It eats up at least four hours of weekly time and even then, only 40% of all data is logged on average.
Fireflies harnesses the power of machine intelligence to automate this process, giving you back those 4+ hours to devote to actual selling and strategy. It logs 100% of data for 100% of calls that you invite Fireflies to, removes the risk of human error, and even allows you to search through archived conversations from days, weeks, and months ago to quickly find the information you need. Here's a video on how the extension works:
Let the machines do the dirty work
Sales professionals view administrative tasks as inefficient. In today’s digital world, it makes no sense to shoulder that burden when it can be reliably offloaded to a computer at a fraction of the current cost. Make Fireflies the next smart addition to your team.
Fireflies is an AI-powered conversation tracking platform that integrates seamlessly with Zoho CRM, your calendar and your web conferencing tools of choice. The extension can be found here in the Marketplace. Learn more about how to get the most out of Fireflies here.
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