The growth of a company depends essentially on the health of its sales pipeline. To ensure smoother and consistent flow of sales leads, the sales pipeline has to be managed well, or else the conversions could go dry. This requires a right set of sales tools, and CRM is one of them.
An advanced CRM can enable sales teams to maintain a healthy pipeline and smoothly move the leads to conversion. However, there are few best practices that need to be followed to optimize sales pipeline management, which will lead to an increase in the output of your sales team and ensure a better conversion rate.
Synchronize sales and marketing
To generate leads, you have to align your sales and marketing efforts. By doing this, you can ensure the promotional campaigns run by the marketing team deliver qualified leads, which can then be closed by the sales team. This synchronization, which keeps the sales pipeline healthy and flowing, can be achieved using CRM.
With the help of a CRM that is integrated with marketing automation, sales reps can specifically spot the promotional content being consumed by leads and get valuable insights about each prospect. Thus, a CRM with a marketing automation feature can be highly useful in maintaining the synergy between sales and marketing that can lead to optimized pipeline management.
Enhanced lead-scoring
Using an advanced CRM, your sales team will be able to score leads much more effectively and accurately. Leads can be scored based on various parameters and demographic information such as geographic location, gender, job title, annual income, etc. But an integrated system will also help you track the behavior of each lead who visits your website.
By this, you would also be able to include online actions of your leads, such as content downloads or visits to web pages, and include them in your scores. The higher accuracy of lead scores will allow sales reps to know precisely who their prospects are, and they can prepare for sales calls and meetings in a better way, which will, in turn, improve the conversion rate.
Accurate sales forecasting
The sales pipeline metrics provided by CRM reporting tools allow sales managers to get an accurate forecast of both the leads in the pipeline and the deals that are about to be closed. Having a clear picture of the incoming revenue will help them to manage the expenses in a better way. The CRM with an advanced dashboard can also assist in identifying the bottlenecks in the pipeline, and sales managers can investigate the issue at the right time and address it quickly to ensure the leads keep flowing through each stage of the funnel smoothly.
Apart from this, advanced features such as integrated telephony can allow sales reps to make more calls in less time, queuing up leads in the funnel. With more leads in the pipeline, the number conversion can also be better.
Additionally, a CRM will also enable salespeople to improve the company’s relationship with customers through personalized interactions. Moreover, the CRM can also send timely alerts to salesreps when a lead reaches the scoring threshold and becomes qualified. Instant reminders can allow them to contact the qualified leads at the right time and move them down the funnel with personalized engagement.