How CRM Can Loosen Your Sales Bottlenecks

COVID-19 has changed the business environment for many economies worldwide. According to a special report by the US Chamber of Commerce, up to 43 percent of small businesses are at risk of permanent closure if the government doesn’t intervene. 

Entrepreneurs are continually searching for alternatives and innovative ways to keep their operations afloat. Business owners chose the path less traveled because of their fighting spirit and competitive nature. Values like resilience are being recognized as helpful for post-COVID survival.

Then there’s the traditional business solution to weather any storm: a healthy cash flow.

Improving your cash flow by solving sales bottlenecks

It’s a simple concept: Improve the buyers’ journey in your sales pipeline, get more sales, and increase your cash flow. Having a healthy cash flow gives businesses many options as well as a financial fallback.

Healthy cash flow gives you the flexibility to make your company more competitive, including converting its processes into a more resilient structure, or simply keeping your business alive through minimal operations.

Here are some common sales bottlenecks that impede your business cash flow:

Failure to understand the buyer’s journey – Pushing the wrong content and positioning your brand in the wrong context to move leads further in the pipeline is a common mistake. You simply will not attract your buyer with the approach.

The buyer is not ready – Attracting low-quality leads is exponentially harder to nurture into paying customers than leads who have an active and recurring need for your products and services.

Long sales cycle – There are business models where you can’t avoid a long sales cycle, but the more steps you have to turn a top-level lead into a paying customer, the more likely they are to get stuck somewhere in the pipeline.

Irrelevant information – Throughout the process, leads will need various kinds of information to help them further understand your products and services, evaluate their options, and make a final decision. Feeding them incorrect or irrelevant information will prevent them from moving further down the funnel or even jump ship completely.

Your product or service is the bottleneck – There are cases where your offerings are in the wrong price point, positioned for the wrong demographic, or received a generally negative impression from paying customers. Neglecting (paying) customer feedback can influence the people still in your sales pipeline.

Identifying the inefficiencies in your pipeline is easier said than done, but providing your sales and marketing teams with the right tools to monitor their step-by-step progress and how their actions (or inactions) can tip the scales in your favor.

Using a CRM properly to resolve sales bottleneck problems

The Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system helps manage relationships and interactions between paying customers and potential buyers. Most CRM systems have some or all of the following features:

• Generate leads
• Gather and curate customer data and behavior
• Deliver actionable insights
• Manage social media accounts
• Facilitate engagement activities between your team and customers

Some CRM systems are focused on a particular feature to fit different corporate needs. Here are some examples:

Social Media CRM

A study by Microsoft shows that using CRM for social media engagements can boost sales performance by 76.8%. Lead generation and gathering customer feedback and insights through social media is a rewarding task. It is also a tedious and time-consuming exercise.

Using CRM technology can help sift through the noise and even analyze curated data for your sales, marketing, and management people to evaluate and use in their campaigns. Having the ability to engage with your customers directly and continuously repositioning your marketing efforts inline with your target market sentiment is a competitive edge.

Lead management system

One of the easiest ways to annoy a potential buyer/paying customer and damage productivity is by failing to keep track of past interactions with the client. Miscommunication by giving conflicting information or repeating past steps to a customer is a speed bump in their buyers’ journey. This is especially true for organizations with large numbers of clients and teams that interact with them.

CRM lead management solutions aggregate client’s history, past interactions, appointments, contact information, known buying behavior, etc. within arms reach. It gives your team the ability to quickly respond to your customers/leads needs and keep them moving along in your sales funnel.

Sales and marketing CRM 

Missed opportunities are children of neglect. Failure to follow up with potential buyers or upsell paying customers at the right moment often turns potential sales into customers doing their business elsewhere. However, badgering customers with too much information also negatively impacts your brand. It is about finding the right balance on when to provide the right information, at the right time, to the right potential buyer. It used to be an impossible task. 

CRMs can manage and even automate this step to lubricate your sales pipeline and keep the leads moving along. Achieving a seamless flow of leads through your pipeline by minimizing mistakes and delays mid-stream caused by technical or human errors is a major contributing factor to bottlenecking. CRM automation technology can take over these tedious tasks and free your teams to focus on analyzing and responding to customer data to increase your efficiency.

Delays in approval

One of the most painful bottlenecks in sales funnels is approval delays. It is especially true for business models with a long and complicated sales process. There are times when a potential customer is ready to buy, but you are not prepared to sell on your end.

Big-ticket sales is a low percentage game, and companies have invested a lot of resources to close them. Most of the time, buyers are also following their own acquisition timelines. Dropping the ball at the end game can cause a potential buyer to sign with a competitor because your side didn’t respond in time.

CRMs ensure that your company’s workflows are in order for a timely response at any point in the sales process. It allows your management team to spot approval bottlenecks and develop process/procedural solutions to mitigate them every step of the way.

Post-sale/customer support bottleneck

Speaking of timely responses, companies that do not have a system in place to nurture leads miss opportunities by failing to cross-sell, up-sell, or gain brand advocates.

Paying customers can generate fresh leads through referrals or even become repeat customers if they are satisfied with your company’s product/service after the sale. 

CRM systems keep track of all completed leads and recycle them back in your sales funnel. Paying customers are automatically classified as warm leads due to their previous buying behavior. They also have a low CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) value because they no longer have to go through the entire funnel to purchase again.

Cost-benefit analysis

Modern managers are mostly aware of the existence and benefits of CRM software. The number of CRM vendors are not small, and it’s no longer just a luxury reserved for large enterprises.

While CRM benefits are no longer in doubt, now that the technology is mature, implementing it in their current workflows requires financial investment, workflow disruption, and organizational retraining. For those reasons alone, it makes corporate managers think twice about integrating them into their business.

CRM can justify its ROI and impact positively the bottom line. According to a Salesforce study,  it can increase sales by up to 29 percent and productivity by up to 34 percent. Capterra says that 47 percent of CRM users in a survey claimed that CRM helps them retain their customers. 

Competition in the new post-COVID environment is fiercer than ever. Companies that survive the pandemic are resilient, agile, and highly aggressive in chasing sales. At this point, it is a battle for survival, and the race has already begun. CRM can be your extra tank of fuel to spur you to the finish line.