What Is Sales Management Software & How Can It Make A Difference To Your Company?
You want your sales team to spend most of their time selling, but what if they’re stuck doing repetitive administrative and non-selling tasks that are just as important? One of the ways you can free up more time for your sales team is with sales management software that can improve productivity and streamline manual admin needs.
If you’re ready to learn more about what sales management tools can do and how they can benefit your organization, explore my breakdown below for answers.
What Is Sales Management?
Your team needs someone to lead them, oversee the day-to-day processes, and create long-term strategies. Sales management encompasses all of these responsibilities, including sales strategy, sales operations, and sales analysis. Each of these sales activities is designed to ensure you’re implementing effective sales management processes that define objectives to help your team hit their KPIs, metrics, and goals.
Your sales managers will also be in charge of recruitment, training and coaching, forecasting, and reporting tasks.
Sales Management Software
Did you know that 45% of sales teams struggle with internal administrative processes, complaining that they waste time and make them ineffective salespeople? Well, sales management software is designed to address all their pain points while supporting the needs of their team leaders as well.
You can hire the most highly skilled individuals, but if they need to handle every task manually, they’re spending too much time and resources on things that can be automated. Sales management solutions can help managers connect with sales reps, ensure salespeople can collaborate with each other, enhance customer relationship management, and provide a variety of virtual solutions to long-term and everyday needs.
Some of the tools and features you’ll find in a sales management platform include:
- Video Conferencing & Dialing Capabilities In-App
- Pipeline Creation & Tracking
- Email & Messaging Templates & Automation
- Social Media Management
- Intelligence Tools
- Calendar Management
- Notifications, Alerts, & Reminders
- Quote Building & Invoicing
- Sales CRM Software
- Custom Dashboards
There are a number of top sales management tools available with these features. Some of my favorites include HubSpot, Pipedrive, Freshsales, Zoho CRM, and Salesforce. These also offer more unique features, like ticketing tools for helpdesks, conversation intelligence with customer-facing chatbots, and deal tracking.
Key Features Of Sales Management Software
Looking at the list of tools above, I’m sure you can already see how they can transform your sales process, streamline your workflow, and improve overall team performance. But let’s take a deeper look at the key features and functionality of the best sales management software, including:
- Pipeline Management: Creating a sales pipeline is an essential part of your operations, but maintaining and improving it is just as important. Pipeline management tools will pinpoint issues in your sales pipeline and surface actionable opportunities for improvement.
- Automated Workflows: Whether it’s trigger-based emails and SMS message follow-ups or always-on lead generation that unearths and tracks new prospects, automation throughout your workflow reduces time spent on manual tasks.
- Customer Interaction History: A record of all customer data can ensure you’re creating relevant and personalized sales messaging for future conversations, show you what customers like, and help you design a winning playbook to enhance your sales management system.
- Sales Forecasting: Using historical sales data, forecasting tools allow you to predict market trends and changes in customer behavior to develop effective sales strategies for the future. An artificial intelligence-enhanced system continuously reviews sales performance to unearth new insights.
- Customer Segmentation: Understanding your customer base and personalizing outreach to meet their needs is essential. Use their geographic location, last contact date, industry, position, and lifetime value to craft unique messaging that moves your sales funnel forward.
- Integrations: Your sales management software should integrate with all your digital tools to deliver the best possible performance. Look for tools that offer integrations with LinkedIn, Microsoft Outlook, and Gmail to enhance project management, email marketing, and other essential tasks.
- Lead Management: This is a marketing automation that helps you develop methodologies aimed at lead scoring and contact management for marketing campaigns, outgoing consumer advertising, and inbound responses to advertising.
- Mobile App Accessibility: Whether you have a robust remote team or an outside sales department, accessibility for sales leaders on the go is essential. You’ll find that some sales management platforms offer cloud-based native apps that are compatible with a variety of devices, while others focus on web-based solutions.
Why Sales Management Software Is Important
The benefits of sales management software should already be pretty clear, but here are some you might not have considered:
- Highly Granular Prioritization: Your managers can prioritize and assign tasks to the right sales rep for the job. Whether it’s a sales automation that qualifies and ranks leads in real-time, sending contact info to the right team members, or automated onboarding of new hires that allows you to do more with fewer resources, sales management software touches on every part of your sales processes.
- Centralize Customer Details: Any communication with or about a customer can now be housed in one central place, ensuring every team member has access to their complete history. This type of visibility allows anyone to pick up where a different rep left off without covering old ground and guaranteeing your customer support has a more personal touch.
- Reduce Administrative Tasks: Workflow automation is a big deal, especially when it comes to reminders, notifications, and alerts. Your sales management system can identify important follow-up information, discover new opportunities to meet sales goals, and interpret customer behavior for sales reps.
- Improve Forecasting & Analytics: Sales report generation and forecasting has been a cumbersome task for years, but with a sales CRM platform, advanced technology can analyze metrics, goals, and performance to assess your strategies and identify areas for improvement.
Now What?
So now you know all about this new tool and how it can help your organization grow. What do you do next? The answer is to do more research. Explore your options to find a sales management software that fits your needs in terms of pricing, functionalities, and implementation. There are tools out there that fit the needs of startups and small businesses, as well as enterprise organizations.
If you’re not sure where to start, you can explore the blog for sales management software overviews or sign up for the newsletter to get insights from the experts every week.