How Prophet CRM helps effectively manage sales activity
This is the first in a series of articles intended to help sales executives effectively manage their sales process and team using Prophet CRM
When looking to implement CRM in their companies, executives often talk about tracking and reports, but rarely talk about giving their people a tool that will actually help them perform their job junction better. Take the sales team for example. Management rightly wants to track their activity, but often overlooks two key questions; is the CRM tool going to help the sales person generate more sales? Will people actually enter the data?
Prophet Software addresses both of these questions. Along with quenching management’s thirst for tracking reports, Prophet packs a powerful punch for the sales team by increasing lead and quote conversion, managing their sales pipeline and ensuring follow-up. Most importantly Prophet is super easy to use. Even non-computer types can easily navigate around and enter the info with just a couple clicks.
And it does so in a most non-threatening way. It lives within Outlook. There are over 400 million Outlook users. In fact Outlook has become the de facto standard for small and medium sized businesses to manage business email and calendar as well as managing tasks and contacts.
And if you think about it for a moment, doesn’t Outlook itself contain the baseline functionality needed in any CRM; providing shared communications, emailing, contact database and task management.
Prophet simply adds CRM functionality to Outlook.
- Contact Management
- Opportunity Management
- Workflow and Follow-up Automation/li>
- Reporting
You can only manage what you can measure
One of the most powerful insights executives can gain in their business is a true understanding of those things that really drive the business forward. Let’s refer to these as key performance indicators.
We all know that in sales, there are behaviors and activities that ultimately drive revenue. Desired behaviors can be represented by certain activities, which can be measured. The desired behaviors in sales can be represented by three representative categories: Prospecting, Selling and Closing.
Prospecting can be represented by outbound dials, or cold calls. Progress in the sales process can be represented by how many meetings or demonstrations were held, or how many quotes have been generated.
Each of these behaviors is represented by specific measurable key activities.
Decide What Activity you want to track
First, identify activities you want to track at each stage of the sales process. Typically you will want to identify activities you wish to track throughout the process. I suggest identifying at least one in each stage: Early Stage – Mid Stage – Late Stage. Examples of these activities are Calls, Meetings, Demos and Proposals.
With Prophet you can easily create and track key performance indicators so you will gain visibility into your team’s sales pipeline. You can run reports on the number of meetings, calls, quotes or product demonstrations, track team sales activity, capture data using custom fields, forecast revenue and more.
First, understand where you are by creating a baseline and benchmark for your team. Then begin to refine reinforce what is working well and troubleshoot areas that are weak. For example you may find some team members have a high closing ratio but do not prospect enough to keep their sales pipeline full. Others may make a lot of dials but get very few prospects to the next stage such as a demo or meeting.
Once you have established the basic key indicators, it’s easy to track them on an individual or team basis.
In the next article we will discuss the creation of a consistent and repeatable sales process.
About the Author….Warren Stokes is currently the Vice President of Sales at Avidian Technologies, a company that provides easy to use CRM built into Microsoft Outlook. Stokes has over 25 years of experience in sales and management and holds two patents with another patent pending in sales process automation. He has implemented CRM applications in four companies in the software and high tech manufacturing segments. Stokes can be reached at warrens@avidian.com