- How to convert your leads into sales
with these five CRM features.
If you've been in business for long enough,
you know that sales are one of the key drivers
to growth, and you can't even stay afloat without sales.
No matter if you're selling products
or services, you need good sales processes
for your business to survive and thrive.
And the keyword here is the process.
If you don't have the right process,
you're not going to ever have your sales machine fine-tuned.
If your sales team, no matter how big or small it is,
if it needs redundant tasks
that you need to continually do each
and every single day, like filling out spreadsheets
and manually scheduling calls with prospects,
you're missing out on a huge opportunity.
From the moment you have a new lead
in your pipeline to the moment
you close a sale, you need to have
your sales process nailed to the T
and automate as much as you can so, that way,
you can generate the most revenue per individual.
Now before I dive in on how you can maximize your sales,
I want to let you know that this video is
by Pipedrive and is sponsored by them,
and funny enough, even if they didn't sponsor it,
I've used Pipedrive for so many years,
I would've mentioned them in this video anyway.
So let's dive right in.
I have a ad agency, and in my ad agency,
it's spread throughout the world.
We have dozens of people working
in sales in many different countries.
Heck, if I had to guess, we probably have close
to 100 sales reps globally.
Literally, we're probably getting close
to 100 sales reps globally.
Just in my S&B division at NPA,
I think we have 48 sales reps,
and we're trying to hire another 12 or 13.
And if there's one thing that's allowed
my business to grow from nothing
in 2018 to one of the fastest-growing companies
in 2021, according to "Inc. Magazine"
in the United States, we're number 21, it is sales.
My teams know exactly what to do
at each stage of the sales process,
and we rely primarily on one tool
to help us streamline that, and that is our CRM.
Research by Nucleus in 2011 shows
that the average return on investment
on CRM is 8 dollars and 71 cents
for each dollar spent.
That's massive.
That's almost 11 years ago, when CRM was used
by just a handful of enterprise companies,
plus the CRM solutions back then weren't
as good as they are now.
So you should expect that a CRM helps
you even more now than it did back then,
because it has so many more features
to streamline and automate yourselves.
Now the industry has matured so much,
to the extent that you can pretty much streamline
and automate most of your sales process,
which means that your ROI should,
if I had to take a guess, be double that.
Today, I'm going to walk you through five key CRM features
that allow you to convert your leads
into sales in the most efficient way possible.
I'm also recommending Pipedrive
as your go-to solution for all the features
that I'm going to show you,
as that's the system that we use
in some of our companies, and I see
my sales reps' data from all my local
and international teams in one platform,
which makes things simple.
There are essentially five things
that you need to look at when choosing a CRM.
Pipelines.
You need a way to visualize your entire sales process
and how deals are moving from stage one
to stage two to stage three, et cetera, until they close.
Heck, even until they upsell
and you can even get more money out of that customer.
Two, automations.
Your sales process may be very good
at converting leads, but if most
of your sales activities are done manual,
you won't be able to scale,
and people are more expensive now
than they ever have been,
especially since the great resignation.
So you want to make sure that you automate
as much as possible, so, that way,
your people are the most efficient.
They can spend most of their time selling and closing deals.
Three, lead management.
Across all your digital touchpoints with clients,
you need to make sure that you capture leads
through Live Chat, web forms,
chatbots, and every single way
that you can imagine, and make sure
that it integrates within your sales process.
Four, reporting.
As a business owner, you got to know your numbers,
and if you have to scramble
through a few different platforms
in order to know what you need, you're in trouble.
Five, integration.
If your CRM is in a silo that doesn't communicate
with other platforms you use in your business,
such as Zoom calls or Slack for team communication,
or even Asana for task management,
you're missing out on efficiency and productivity.
So let's go over them one by one.
Pipeline.
Having pipelines help you map out different stages
of your existing sales process
and move leads through each stage.
The more important thing is that your sales team is focused
on the actions that they need to take
in order to keep moving the leads through the pipeline.
Pipedrive allows you to develop a clear understanding
of your sales momentum and priorities
and refocus your efforts accordingly.
In Pipedrive, you can add deals,
assign the monetary value, win probability,
and expected close date.
Beyond that, you'll be able to organize
and track your pipeline by stages.
You can customize the stages to suit your sales cycle,
create team pipelines, and even filter results
by rep or stage and have one for each member.
In other words, you can slice and dice
your data any way you want,
and even color code different things,
so, that way, different deals draw more attention
and stand out.
And as for automation, your sales team shouldn't
be spending too much time on repetitive tasks,
things like sending emails to leads
or scheduling follow-up activities one by one,
or even assigning statuses,
can become a big time sink.
With Pipedrive, you can automate a few critical tasks
that'll make a real difference in your team.
You can send personalized emails automatically.
Pipedrive will also use the information
you add to your leads
to automatically personalize the interactions
that you have with them by email,
and you can automate repetitive sales tasks.
When a lead moves through your pipeline,
you can automatically create and schedule activities
like sales calls, email follow-ups,
and even proposal writing with tools like Sales Docs,
which is part of Pipedrive,
and external tools like Better Proposals.
You can be reminded about critical sales activities
and doing that admin work of scheduling
your sales-related tasks can be time-consuming,
and you can even make some bad mistakes.
Pipedrive can send you reminders
of all the important things that
you need to do with each lead so
that you can focus on the actions
you need in order to close a deal.
Now let's dive into lead management.
Pipedrive has a suite of tools
and functionality to help you manage your leads.
You have a centralized Leads Inbox
that helps you declutter your CRM
and improve your presales communications with prospects.
Once a lead is qualified, you can easily convert
it to a deal and move it to your pipeline.
When it comes to lead generation,
Pipedrive offers two of the best lead generation methods
that I've known today.
Web Forms allows you to collect leads
from your website traffic and import them
into your pipeline, your contacts,
or your Leads Inbox.
It's your choice.
You'll also receive a email notification
so that you can follow up with a lead
while they're still hot.
And that's the key.
You want to follow-up as quickly as they come in.
Now, Pipedrive's Live Chat and chatbot will help visitors
with a high purchase intent by engaging them
through a live conversation.
The chatbot can be customized to ask
and answer specific questions,
reply with specific messages,
and even prequalify leads that come
through your website.
The Live Chat will assign chats
to your salespersons right away
if the chatbot considers that lead to be qualified.
Now, when you want to talk about reporting,
just having data about your sales isn't enough.
You've got to be able to extract valuable insights
from your data.
You'll want to understand which products are driving the
most results, why your closing rates falter,
and even identify winning secrets
from your top sales reps.
Pipedrive reporting is focused
on translating your data into actionable insights.
You can customize your report
to meet the needs of your business,
do revenue forecasting, and set goals
to measure your performance against.
Now, Marketplace is one
of the coolest things about Pipedrive.
It's the fact that it integrates
with a lot of other apps that you may be using
in your workflow.
You can expand the capabilities
of your Pipedrive account by adding apps
that connect with other popular services
like Slack or Trello or Zapier, or even Gmail.
So the takeaway for you, for salespeople,
a CRM is a fantastic asset
in helping to follow-up on leads,
and a CRM platform with allow you
to monitor your client records,
keep track of multiple conversations,
and process follow-ups.
Pipedrive with give you the best features
and capability that you need from a CRM
in a super easy-to-use interface
and pretty much automate all the lower-value activities
for you so that your team can focus on closing.