Giving Salesforce.com a boost.
Sales, as we all know, is both an art and science. Organizations spend thousands, if not millions of dollars a year in sales training, marketing, and technology to stay ahead of the game. However, when it’s all said and done, there’s only three actual ways to increase bottom line sales—and no, it doesn’t involve the Mafia, voodoo, or Britney Spears. Regardless of which tools, technologies, processes, training, or marketing are used, sales organizations can only improve performance by doing one (or all) of the following:
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Improve the company’s sales close rate.
It’s nothing fancy, just convince more of your prospects that you’re the right fit. This element is not about increasing the number of prospects, it’s about getting better at closing the ones you already have. In many cases this involves sales training; but frequently includes technology systems like CRM and SFA (sales force automation). The most popular tool for this end of the sales spectrum is hosted CRM champion Salesforce.com. CRM and sales force automation tools like Salesforce provide the ability to manage tasks and events, information, pipelines, and sales opportunities to effectively improve close rates, and it’s been proven to work. Statistically speaking, well-designed CRM and SFA show a 17 percent return on investment (per CSO Insights).
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Increase the total dollar value per close.
In other words, close bigger deals. This is one aspect that technology doesn’t really help with. If your product is good enough, compelling enough, and your sales reps are skilled enough, then you are likely to see bigger deals, but otherwise there’s no magic technology wand that can make this happen.
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Increase the total number of prospects.
It makes sense, doesn’t it, that if I increase my number of prospects, all other things being equal, I’ll get an increase in sales. How do we increase prospects? We either have to generate more leads and qualify them (marketing), or we have to get better at qualifying the leads we already get (lead management). Strangely, this is one of the most overlooked aspects of sales and marketing in the entire business world. Dick Lee, founder of sales consulting firm High Yield Methods compares poor lead management to “shooting yourself in the foot with a pistol, then getting out the automatic assault rifle to do it right”. Proper lead management can literally multiply revenues by 25, 50, 100, 200 percent. So what are you doing about it?
Well, if you’re already using Salesforce.com to address item one, and item two isn’t really technology dependent, how do you address item three? One simple solution, that has inexplicably fallen out of vogue, is to do timely, relevant phone calling. Why? Because it’s proven that active phone calling, when done in conjunction with voice mail and email, creates a marketing synergy that boosts response rates five to ten times over doing just phone calling, email, or voice messaging alone. All sales reps understand this intuitively; few have the patience, time, or tools to reap the benefits.
The answer? The Salesforce.com PowerDialer™, developed by InsideSales.com, Inc. The PowerDialer™ is an automated telephone dialer for sales agents that integrates directly to your Salesforce.com system that triples the number of phone calls an agent can make in the same given amount of time. Contact, call back, and conversion ratios are dramatically boosted by using automated voice messaging and email to stay in contact with your prospects at the click of a button. The InsideSales.com PowerDialer for Salesforce.com has been proven to increase total prospects by 50 to 300 percent—effectively doubling, even tripling total sales revenues. What would an increase of even 25 percent more qualified prospects do to your bottom line?
For a demonstration and more information, visit visit http://www.insidesales.com/salesforce-tools.php and see what a PowerDialerâ„¢ can do for you.