Uzi Shmilovici — March 8, 2017 When Steve Jobs first laid out plans for the revolutionary iPhone, did he build it for his engineers or for the millions of people who use it every day?
We all know the answer: it was built for the end user. But the companies that develop customer relationship management (CRM) platforms seem to have lost sight of who their end users are: sales reps.
At Base, we’ve built a sales platform knowing that sales reps are the ones engaging with it day in and day out. Our CRM is geared toward delivering prescriptive sales insights and generating data and analytics to guide major decisions and supercharge results.
The current CRM landscape is full of messy interfaces that can’t leave a desktop computer and cause headaches for sales teams. See the first post in this series for more on that.
There is a myriad of reasons to use a CRM that sales reps actually like using. So if you’re looking to invest in a new CRM, here are a few reasons why you need to find one that works best for your sales team.
Increase User Adoption
The goal for your CRM is obvious: to have 100% adoption. Yet most other CRMs fall far short of this mark, as they don’t give reps the flexibility they crave.
Your sales reps are traveling the globe (or even just going across town) to close deals and generate revenue for your company. Wouldn’t you like for them to have the ability to document a sale or interaction right after it happens? Sales reps would. Having mobile access to the company’s CRM, whether that means via a smartphone, tablet or laptop is one of the biggest desires of reps.
Allowing your sales reps the ability to access your CRM on-the-go gives them the significant benefit of having necessary customer data at their fingertips. It also reduces the friction of the transaction and lag time, allowing sales professionals to instantly input key customer information, instead of waiting until they log onto your server – if that ever happens.
Still, many CRMs treat mobile access as some kind of walled-off premium feature, charging a king’s ransom for a sales team to carry the CRM wherever they may go. This division can really hold back your team. Going with a mobile-friendly CRM can actually boost sales. Among a survey of CRM decision makers, Nucleus Research found a 14.6 percent productivity boost within mobile capabilities.
We believe that not only should CRMs be able to go anywhere, they should also have a consumer-grade user interface. In an Accenture study, 56 percent of sales reps said that their CRM isn’t customized to meet their needs. Companies are always looking to cut the friction from the sales process, and we’ve built our CRM to help (not hinder) your sales.
Companies that use Base’s CRM find the problem of user adoption to be a thing of the past. In fact, 70% of Base customers report 80-100% user adoption, enabling them to make more educated decisions through the prescriptive sales insights ultimately fueled by our platform.
Base built its CRM for the end user: sales reps. That is why our platform is 100% integrated with mobile and why our mobile app is the highest rated CRM in the app store.
Boost Data Quality (and Quantity)
If you ask anyone on your sales team, they’ll say that they wish it was easier to capture data within their CRM. They’ll probably dream of a platform where data from phone calls and emails is centralized and easy to recall.
One of the biggest pain points among sales reps is the laborious manual data entry process. An Introhive study of CRM users shows that 81 percent feel the accuracy of data captured could improve by capturing quality information from people they meet or email with. Most importantly, 75 percent feel they could be more productive if they spent less time on data entry.
Introhive also points out that 88 percent of CRM users admit to entering incomplete customer information. Additionally, 63 percent of CRM users have duplicate contacts in their CRM.
When the data entry process is burdensome, sales reps will find another way to log data (or companies will offer a workaround). When they find another way to log data, your data sources are fragmented. When your data sources are fragmented, you can’t paint a true picture of how well your company is doing. It might seem like a small inconvenience, but proper data entry is vitally important to your sales team.
That’s why Base’s platform features automated data capture. We can draw from emails, phone calls and other sources and organize this information all in one place. The less time you spend doing data entry, the more time you have to spend on sales. Productivity has increased by up to 60 percent for a significant portion of our clients, with another 10 percent claiming productivity enhancements upwards of 75 percent.
Base’s CRM also enables sales teams to create and enforce a standardized dataset through custom pipelines, fields and tags. This streamlines data capture and keeps all information organized and in context so that you can always find what you need. Having accurate and uniform data fuels a more efficient sales process, providing your company with a complete picture of performance.
Uncover Prescriptive Insights
Most CRMs deliver descriptive insights, which can simply indicate sales results, but don’t offer anything deeper. Others focus on predictive insights, which use past data to extrapolate a guess about future performance.
A Domo survey explains that 65 percent of sales leaders feel it’s too difficult to glean meaningful insights from their data. That’s because data shouldn’t just tell you where you’ve been and where you’re headed, it should help you chart a path to higher goals. You can’t do that if half of your sales reps are using their own process, or worse, not using the CRM at all.
We believe that CRMs should provide reps with a positive user experience that inherently drives user adoption and captures the level of sales data needed to generate actionable performance recommendations, creating a revenue-generating loop.
For example, we had one client, Guerrero Howe, capture more than 41 million data points through our CRM. From there, they were able to codify and isolate the key factors impacting their sales performance using our sales science platform, Apollo.
It turned out that they had prospects who were providing plenty of referrals — but not much in the way of revenue. While these referrals generated significant revenue per deal, they were not being closed. After some more analysis, Guerrero Howe was able to walk away with prescriptive insights around the profiles of its best referrals, as well as key areas for sales coaching.
AI can be a powerful tool, reading data and creating insights for your sales reps. Base harnesses AI technology to provide actionable alerts and insights, making it easier for your team to generate sales. We don’t want you to just maintain current levels. We know that a prescriptive sales process can boost what you’re already doing.
When you have a CRM your sales reps love to use, the data is all in one place. You’ll be able to generate meaningful insights from that data, giving you an accurate map of where your company is now, and where it needs to go.
The choice is simple: go with the all-in-one solution that was built with your sales team in mind. Steve Jobs would approve.
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