Why Are Sales People Forced to Search for Customer Information?

Sales Lead Management System Will Help

Your sales team should be your company’s?ultimate group of closers for qualified leads. In order for your sales team to be able to personalize each customer interaction — which enhances their ability to finalize the sale — they need to have a complete understanding of a sales lead’s needs and general persona.?Unfortunately, your sales team’s?efficiency is significantly reduced because they have to take time to?search for each customer’s information,?instead of focusing on the sale itself.

What causes this problem?

Your sales team should be able to get the customer information that they need without jumping through hoops. However, your marketing team members are the primary caretakers of customer data — they spend much of their time finding creative ways to obtain the information in the first place. Unfortunately, marketers often only deliver partial information about the sales leads that they have worked so hard to generate.?This often leaves salespeople without critical data?that can completely transform the way they approach a sale.?This?lack of communication between your sales and marketing departments?makes everyone’s lives more?difficult.

How to resolve this problem

First, you should know that pointing the finger at either your sales or marketing team is not the best way to handle this problem. It is very difficult to both communicate large amounts of customer information to another department while simultaneously trying to attract new leads or close the deal. What you need to do is start?investing?in a sales lead management system — also known as a CRM. Here are the benefits they offer:

They reduce errors

As customer information comes in, your CRM will automatically compile the data; this significantly reduces the likelihood of errors, especially regarding the details for customer orders.

Automatic contact searches

Instead of forcing people?to filter through endless lists of customer names, a CRM will allow your sales team to quickly pull up customer data with a simple name search.

Customer data is comprehensively compiled in one location

As a sales lead interacts with your marketing team, consumer data is inevitably collected. A good CRM will connect this data with the contact, so that your sales team can bring all of this data up at one time — without having to do an extensive search.

Your sales team can more effectively prioritize customers

Which customers are most important for your business? This is a very difficult question to answer when you do not have all of the data you need to understand a sales lead’s buying potential. Good CRMs can organize customer data in a way that allows your sales team to prioritize the opportunities with the greatest earning potential.

Better sales reporting

More customer data is not just a short-term enhancement for your sales team. Having a complete understanding of the customers that they interact with will allow your sales team to provide more complete sales reporting statistics for better analysis.

As you can see, a great sales lead management system will not only eliminate the need for your sales team to dig up customer information by streamlining the data sharing process between salespeople and marketers, but it will also enhance both the sales?and?marketing process in other ways.

Don’t let your sales leads float away unnecessarily

If your sales team does not have all of the information they need about a customer, then they are handicapped during each sale; likewise, if they have to spend an inordinate amount of time searching for customer data, their ability to interact with customers is reduced. You can resolve both of these problems with a great sales lead management system.

Sometime the issue is not just with sale…it it also involves marketing. Take our FREE Alignment Assessment to see where your gaps in performance lie. It?s confidential and will reveal performance gaps between the two departments.

Marketing Matters Inbound?is an inbound marketing firm specializing in online conversions, content?strategy, PPC campaigns and traditional media placement. Our experience in?B2B digital?marketing?and?traditional media?allows us to deliver results through a strategic media mix. We believe in?aligning and merging marketing and sales/operations for optimal return on your marketing investment.