7 ways to improve communication and work organization at a sales department thanks to CRM 

 It’s no news that effective communication and organization of work at the sales department is the basis for success in sales. However, people often don’t know how to sort out the work of the sales team so that it’s performed in a repeatable way that will also ensure a high level of communication in the team. In this case, it’s worth using tools that will automatically introduce certain ‘rituals’ into the work of salespeople. We present 7 ways to improve communication and work organization at a sales department with the help of a CRM system. 

Gathering information about customers 

At the stage of both adding a contact to the CRM system and handling that contact, it’s worth ensuring that the contact is supplemented on an ongoing basis with any collected information. This will not only help you to get to know the customer, but also to build a more lasting relationship with them. But rewriting data about customers can be tedious. It’s easy to make a mistake, e.g., by making a typo in an email address or a name. In Livespace CRM, thanks to the Google Chrome extension, with a single click you can add contacts directly from GoldenLine, LinkedIn, or Facebook. 

The view of adding a new contact in Livespace 

Another feature of the CRM system that significantly affects communication in a team is the ability to add notes from meetings, records of arrangements, comments, information about offers or estimated costs. Why is it so important to accurately record information about arrangements with customers? Thanks to such notes, the salesperson will always be prepared for the next conversation and, for sure, will impress the customer with his or her knowledge of the customer. It’s also possible to use the space in Livespace to store files and conduct discussions internally within the company. For example, if someone in the team notices that he/she can give some advice to another person on how to deal with the customer, all he/she has to do is leave a comment under the activity of the salesperson who is handling the specific deal. 

Caring for the quality of information about customers 

Have you ever received an email or a phone call from a customer and had to quickly look for information about the course of the previous conversations in order to remember who the customer was or what you had promised them regarding the offer? Keeping up-to-date any customer information available in the CRM system has a direct impact on the sales results achieved at your company. You can use the gathered information to carry out sales activities or simply to avoid any undesirable mistakes, such as making a phone call to identify the needs of a customer who’s already being served by your company, or assigning the same duplicate lead to two salespeople.  

Deduplication of data in Livespace 

A very useful feature that helps to take care of the gathered information about customers is data deduplication. Mass searching for duplicates will save you time, and help to maintain the consistency and correctness of the database. If there are any duplicate contacts as a result of, e.g., importing or mistakenly adding the same lead several times, you can combine all those contacts into one. In Livespace, you can do this by using the contact merging feature.  

Effective customer segmentation 

Sometimes it happens that you are in the process of serving many different customers with different values and with different likelihoods of signing a contract. It’s difficult to decide which of them is worth your attention first in order to maximize the chance of achieving the best possible sales results. In such a situation, it’s worth using a CRM system to set clear and automated rules for evaluating customers, so that you can easily identify the ones that provide you with the greatest income. 

The Kanban board for forecasting sales in Livespace 

In an effective CRM system, you’re able to define your own customer segments, define any parameters to describe them, and set your own score ranges that will distinguish hesitant and low-value customers from the extremely important ones that give a chance to achieve the sales targets. It doesn’t matter whether you sell in the B2B or B2C model. You can segment both companies and individuals by setting mutually independent evaluation criteria for them. If you use the filtering option, e.g., by selecting customers you have marked as ‘sure to buy’, you will be able to forecast sales results in a specific period. 

Monitoring sales effectiveness 

When arranging the work in the sales team, a very effective method of planning the work will be monitoring the effectiveness of sales. Using Livespace CRM, you’re able to control the status and course of the salespeople’s activities thanks to advanced statistics. These are generated automatically based on the activities of the salespeople.   

The view of the “sales effectiveness” section in Livespace 

The “sales effectiveness” section is linked to your sales process. It allows to analyze the individual stages and activities in the sales funnel view, and quickly draw conclusions as to which of these stages your salespeople most often lose at. The data are refreshed in real time, so you can react on an ongoing basis and agree on possible solutions with your salespeople. Thanks to this feature, you don’t have to wait until the end of the month or quarter to find out how much your company will make. You’ll be able to forecast sales and increase them by correcting any activities that lead to a loss. 

Mutual support between salespeople 

Do you ever notice in your conversations with salespeople that some of them are involved in too many sales at a time to be able to effectively handle customers, while others have trouble getting customers and no tasks to do? If so, another useful feature of statistics in the CRM system is the ability to monitor open sales opportunities. Here you will see how many sales opportunities your salespeople are currently handling.  

The view of open deals in Livespace 

Moving on to the next section, you’re able to check which salesperson is the ‘owner’ of the given sales opportunity. This way you will learn how work is distributed among your salespeople. If you notice that someone has too much on his or her shoulders, you and that person will be able to agree on who else you can delegate some of his or her tasks to, in order to take better care of the customers.  

The view of deals owners in Livespace 

Well-matched and well-assigned tasks 

If your business is based on teamwork, the marketing team often makes sure that the customers find out about your product and takes care of acquiring leads, while the salespeople are responsible for direct contact with the customers, the customer support people teach them how to use the product and solve their problems, and the accounting team issues invoices and controls the payments. Everybody has their own responsibilities and tasks, which together make up the customer’s impression and opinion about your company. This is why it’s worth making sure that the tasks related to customer service, at every stage of the customer’s contact with your company, are smoothly transferred to people responsible for the given stage. A CRM system will be a helpful tool for such cooperation between departments too. In Livespace, you can configure the relevant tasks so that they correspond to the actual customer service path at your company. 

Creating a task template in Livespace 

You can create your own task templates, in which you’ll specify who’s responsible for completing the specific activity, and when. In this way, work will run smoothly between individual teams. Also, nobody will have any doubts about when and at what stage the customer should be taken care of. Such automation will save a lot of time for your salespeople, who, without the help of a CRM system, themselves have to delegate tasks to other departments with which they cooperate in the course of working with the customer.   

A mobile cloud-based CRM system 

Are there salespeople at your company who attend meetings on customers’ premises, travel a lot, and stay out of the office? To them, access to data about customers and being able to plan tasks, such as sending an offer after a meeting, are a very important part of work too. If your salespeople work in the field, they will enjoy the greatest convenience with a cloud-based CRM system available from a mobile application. 

The view of the Livespace application 

The Livespace application enables convenient access to information in the CRM system from any place, while maintaining complete data security. It’s a solution that will streamline the work of your salespeople, giving them free access to data gathered by the entire team, even if they’re away from the office. This solution will help to minimize the risk of communication problems in contacts with customers. The possibility of adding tasks and notes will make it possible for the salesperson after a meeting to plan the execution of all the activities agreed there. In this way, he or she certainly won’t forget about any guidelines or deadlines important to the customer.