How to Cheat at Sales (and get away with it)

 

OK, so you’re not really cheating when you use CRM… BUT your life will become so much easier because of it.

 

You are, after all, just a person.  A real living example of a human being; with all your frailties and propensities for human error.

 

A recent poll conducted by Centrify reports that 35% of respondents reported data inaccuracies and human error, principally as a result of boredom and distraction at work.  But what about lost sales?  What about deals which have slipped through the net as a result of human error?  Without the right tools the scope of possibility for human error becomes much greater.

 

Getting a great CRM system (like NetSuite) is the best way to cheat at sales.

 

Read about why I love NetSuite here

 

Here’s how a robust CRM system will help you become a better sales person:

 

1)  Build your trustworthiness

 

Customers are naturally suspicious of sales people.  Everyone has had bad interactions with (not very good) sales people.  Because of all the dross out there, you cannot assume you have the trust of your potential customer.  You have to build it.    The best way to build trust is to start by doing what you said you were going to do, when you said you were going to do it.  The easiest example of this is to call when you say you are going to, down to the exact time.  If you say you’ll call back at 2pm on Tuesday … do it.  If you can’t honestly commit to a time, make it vaguer (say Tuesday afternoon instead) but still make sure you do it.  It isn’t good enough to call the following morning.  By that point you’ve already eroded their trust.  Your CRM system should be able to alert you when to make your calls – either through your task management or via alerts on screen or by email.

 

Side note:  It doesn’t actually matter whether the customer takes your call or not – as long as they know you’ve upheld your side of the bargain.

 

2) Aid your memory

If you’re anything like any other great sales person I know, you simply cannot recall every interaction you’ve ever had with ever potential partners and customers.  But being able to demonstrate that you do recall information (like where your customer went on holiday, or what date the next board meeting takes place) will help you to re-establish contact and rapport after a gap between conversations.  Your customer might also appreciate being reminded of a few choice parts of your last conversation.  It will help them warm back up to you more quickly.

Use the contacts section in your CRM to keep robust notes about all your conversations and interactions and to jog your memory prior to the next call.

 

3) Forget me not

 

I don’t know a single sales person who hasn’t invested time in selling to a potential customer only to forget to call them back… at all.  But I hasten to add, this ONLY happens to sales people without CRM.  Without a CRM system you are relying on a) your memory  b) pen and paper  c) a crude MS Office work around.

 

Read about Bad CRM here

 

4) Prioritise your time

 

When faced with a giant list of names, it will, at the very least, take time and effort to sift through and sort out the priority order of your potential customers.   In sales it isn’t a job you do once.  The order of priority will change almost daily, depending on who you’ve been able to talk to that day and how each of the deals are progressing.  A CRM system will help you prioritise your calls both in terms of next action dates but also probability of converting.  You can use a status to determine how advanced the deal is and you can use the traditional lead – prospect – opportunity scenario to determine the importance of each of your potential customers.  A lead is traditionally a piece of raw data with which you’ve not interacted, a prospect is someone who you have the potential to turn into a customer and an opportunity is someone you are actively engaged with.  All three are as important as each other since your opportunities have been both prospect and lead prior to reaching the opportunity status.

 

To talk to us about how CRM can help you legitimately cheat at sales, get in touch

 

Cofficient Ltd are NetSuite and SAP ByD Partners.  We provision really smart cloud based business software for really smart customers