Sales leadership holds a sales meeting and it can go one of two ways….

1. Sales Meeting without CRM: Sales team goes through what they did last week and plan on doing next week. Sales Manager asks about upcoming deals and quotes. All this is just verbally communicated and no real follow ups or plans are set. The meeting ends and everyone continues to run their territory as they see fit.
2. Sales Meeting with CRM: Sales Manager starts by displaying the sales dashboards to the team. First, they show the Forecast by Territory and goes through each territory to discuss everyone’s percent to goal status. Next, they display the dashboard for Leads by Territory, this dashboard breaks out new leads in the last week that came in and next to it is the graphed opportunities created in the last week. The Sales Manager asks the team what the plan is to move those leads into Opportunities. They set goals for the team for the next week to hit, such as a certain number of meetings set, calls made, and leads converted to opportunities. The following sales meeting, the sales manager pulls up his Activities dashboard to see who hit their goals.

When you have data behind your sales meetings you have all the information and can call the sales teams’ bluff. It’s easy to say your territory is saturated and that you’re doing all you can do there, but without a process that drives accountability and the data to show the results, how can you be sure? When a company functions without a CRM or doesn’t use their CRM effectively, how do you know what your sales conversion rate is?

Most CRM databases contain tens of thousands of records and only a small percentage of Opportunities when there is no process around driving user adoption and accountability. Leadership should focus on tying all parts of the sales process to CRM; this not only helps the Sales Team be more effective, but allows complete transparency across all users. This allows others to see where they can help foster more sales for the company. Without Forecasting, how can production support you with better lead times? Without quotas and a sales process, how do you know your sales team is really saturating their territory? Without lead conversion rates, how can marketing know if their efforts are effective?

Take time to create a process for your sales team and leading more effective meetings and driving accountability.

Related blog: Lead a Better Sales Meeting ,  Forecasts in CRM

Would you like to discuss the bigger picture with Infor CloudSuite CRM at your company? Connect with a Simplesoft Consultant at support@simplesoft.net

Simplesoft Solutions, Inc. is a customer relationship management (CRM) business consulting and software development firm in Cincinnati/Dayton region and offices in Cleveland, OH  and Charlotte, NC. We provide implementation, integration, development and training for Infor CloudSuite CRM. We have built our business on an ability to creatively adapt CRM to meet the varying needs of our customers’ businesses. We have been helping our customers develop stronger relationships with their customers through improved sales, marketing, customer service, and support processes since 1994.

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