You’re using Zoho CRM because you know how important sales automation is. Even with the best technology, sales teams are still facing challenges in collecting, organizing and leveraging their data.
Get more out of your carefully collected sales data by incorporating these handy tips.
Use advanced reporting features
Zoho CRM has some potent advanced reporting features that are often overlooked. Here are some out-of-the-box reports that you should be using to track important sales metrics:
- Pipeline by Stage: This report helps you to seize opportunities and develop tactics for regressed leads. It provides a detailed view of all your leads that have moved from one customer stage in the pipeline to another.
- Key Accounts (i.e., High-Value Customers): This report is invaluable if you want to invest your time in customer retention, which you should. You might think the responsibility for customer retention belongs to customer service only — but you’ll be surprised to know that customer retention is a natural extension of the sales pipeline. Because you have to spend more money to acquire a new customer than to retain an old one, post-sales care is becoming increasingly important. This report highlights your best customers so you can decide to checkin to see if they need anything, or send them special offers and discounts.
- Sales Cycle Duration: This report helps you to decide if your sales cycle is optimal by tracking the average number of days it takes for your leads to get to a particular stage in the pipeline. Is there a particular stage where your potential customers drop out? Identify and revise it.
- Lead by Status: This reports allows you to monitor the status of your leads and helps you win deals from them. You can also find out which sources are most successful in translating these leads into deals.
- Target Achieved: Tells you if your campaigns are meeting your pre-defined goals. They can help you determine the effectiveness of your campaigns so your decision-makers can make a call about your business tactics, and they're great for keeping your teams on the same page.
Contacts on the go
Your phone isn’t just another expensive gadget or a digital address book, it’s a veritable networking machine. It can save and sort business cards, and sync with Zoho CRM for instant access to all of your business contacts.
If you’re not already syncing your mobile phone (iPhone or otherwise) with Zoho, you’re also running the very real risk of inputting incorrect data into your CRM.
This is what usually happens: you go to a tradeshow, network like crazy, collect hundreds of business cards, and then spend more time entering all that data manually into your CRM than you spent collecting it in the first place.
Or you’re a bit ahead of the game, and you type in each new contact into your mobile phone as you meet them. But then it gets stuck there.
Or you’re out on the road, and gosh darn it! You need a client’s number and it’s not in your phone. You call the office but everyone is out to lunch.
Suzie Blaszkiewicz from software review company GetApp said to me in an interview that having contacts on the go is a MUST. As she stated, "Having access to your contacts while out of the office has never been more important, as more and more people are working remotely, attending sales meetings, and traveling for business. This makes it very important to be able to access all of your client data from a mobile device, as well as to add and update information on the go. Having a native mobile app with all of the same functionality as the web version and that syncs seamlessly across devices helps to minimize the time and effort spent keeping track of customer data, as well as giving that all-important access to your contacts."
Be sure that you and your team are using the Zoho CRM mobile app. The mobile app ensures that your teams have access to the most up-to-date, accurate business contacts when they need it most.
Zoho has thought of everything. With their native card scanner, you can be sure to scan business cards as soon as you get them. This new information will then be synced with Zoho CRM.
With a system like this, everyone can have accurate, up-to-date customer information in real time.
Integrate your Apps
As much as everyone loves the idea of an all-in-one SaaS suite, most SMEs work with their tailored hand-picked SaaS stack.
Different teams inside your organization may use different apps to run their operations.
That’s no problem as long as you have the apps syncing together.
Businesses have discovered one of the big problems with the cloud is the lack of integration. So you get data in your CRM, data in your marketing platform, and data in your customer care platform. But this data sits there, under-utilized.
It’s an extremely inefficient way to run a business. Some of you may have found a workaround, the old faithful import/export function, or your IT department came up with an ad-hoc php script.
But an Experian report found that 85% of businesses that use these “solutions” experience significant problems like importing tainted data, such as duplicates and defunct data.
If you choose a hand-picked SaaS stack for your SME, your best bet is to get a third-partying syncing app, that syncs your cloud apps together. That way your contacts stay up to date across all of your teams.
With an in sync SaaS stack, your teams will always have access accurate, up to date customer and prospect information in real time.
That’s it! I hope you’ve found these tips useful. If you have any tips you’d like to share just let me know.
PieSync is one such integration platform that helps you avoid information silos and data fragmentation by integrating various applications in the cloud with Zoho CRM.
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