Having a CRM is an extremely beneficial factor of any business management system. It’s more than “all of the customer data” in one place, it’s a way for you to actually get to know them. By using a customer tracking tool, you’re allowing your sales team to assess each and every lead based on the factors most important to your business, whether that’s segment, size, geography, etc. From here, the sales team can start to engage the customer in a more informative way, providing suggestions that will cater to the demands of the customer from the perspective of the goods and services you (or a partner) offers.

There’s more to a CRM than just that, it’s also about measuring the effectiveness of your company’s efforts. If a marketing manager wants to know the effectiveness of a single campaign, they may have to go across several different applications gathering sales data just to put it in an excel sheet to form a table. With a CRM, you centralize the data-collection process so that accessing it later is quick and painless, offering your team more time to act on the results rather than figure out what they are.

Rather than asking yourself if something worked, you should be repeating successful strategies and ditching the rest. Getting answers to critical questions is what drives your business, so make sure you’re using the tools that can provide them.

In today’s world of sales and marketing, call centers are using data-driven tactics to convert leads into sales more and more efficiently. But why is there so much pressure to adopt these newly forming procedures and the underlying technology that supports them?

It’s pretty simple actually: it works. Let me explain the top three factors of data-driven techniques.

Sales Visibility

When you’re using system that tracks leads and their behaviors (CRM), you start to build a portrait of the company’s sales landscape. That means you’ll have complete visibility into the different portions of the sales pipeline, so that you can gain a much better understanding of where your leads are going and how they get there.

It’s important to understand a lead’s traversal of your sales pipeline, because this will let you determine how to engage future leads at-a-glance. By looking at your leads’ past behavior, it also allows you to compare rep performance and see who is getting your leads through the pipeline.

Sales Confidence

Using analytics is a good way of strengthening the confidence of your sales team. By analyzing sales data you can, with confidence, establish more clearly defined requirements for good and bad leads. Saving time in the prospecting stage is a huge benefit for any sales team, because it allows more focus and energy to be placed in closing deals with solid leads. Even if it’s just getting to a “no” faster, you’re still accelerating the sales cycle so that reps “down the pipeline” can have a healthy stream of qualified leads.

Dynamic Sales

A data-driven sales process is bound to be much more adaptive than old, out-dated ones. A dynamic sales process strengthens the results of your reps by giving them the tools and information necessary to change their pitch on-the-fly based on what the customer demands. Let’s face it, everyone likes to be treated like they’re number one, and with a dynamic sales process you’re opening up the possibility of catering to multiple buyer personas equally and effectively.