Sales is a tough job. Sales reps face a myriad of challenges every day talking to prospects and trying to close deals. You have to deal with delays, disappointments, and all the other ups and downs that come with the job. These challenges have been compounded further with the widespread quarantine measures going on around the world currently.
Work together from afar. Close deals effectively with Zoho CRM and all the collaborative tools it can bring to your sales team.
The myth of the lone wolf
We’ve all heard the phrase “lone wolf” at some point in our lives. It’s a term used to describe a solitary, highly driven, and self-sufficient person who doesn’t interact much with anyone unless absolutely needed.
There are sales reps, sales managers, and even business owners who operate with this mentality; a mentality fostered and strengthened by a longstanding sales culture and an individual-oriented compensation system. A system where the best performer takes home the biggest commission check.
This has led salespeople to keep information to themselves, exclude others from conversations, detach themselves from useful networks, and more in the interest of getting ahead.
The lone wolf mentality is not conducive to today’s environment. Even with all the modern tools and customer data at their disposal, only 53% of sales reps reach their goals. A CSO survey further expands on this, prescribing a solution to this issue in “effectively collecting and sharing best practices across your sales and service departments.”
Embrace the pack mentality. Do better together.
Gone are the days of one-on-one and face-to-face selling. Modern selling is complex and team oriented with often numerous variables, stakeholders, and deliverables involved.
When you collaborate with different members of your team, you can get insights from different perspectives. This helps you identify problems or holes in your strategy that you otherwise wouldn’t have noticed on your own.
Collaboration between sales reps helps share feedback and healthy criticism that allows everyone to learn and grow. A communicative environment also allows your sales reps to share their best practices, notes, and ideas with their teams, leading to a more productive and efficient sales force. Go above and beyond meeting targets so you can focus on building strong relationships with your customers.
Don’t let distance be a factor in closing deals effectively
As the world embraces the idea of remote work, sales reps will be spending more and more of their time in their CRM as they interact with prospects and work on closing deals.
A CRM with collaborative features can be a great asset that allows sales reps to work together more effectively in this new WFH-centric business environment. A collaborative CRM can allow sales reps to share key information effectively, access important sales collateral when needed, keep everyone updated on the status of changes in a big deal, and more.
A central document repository for all your sales collateral
On every sales team, there’s typically some documents that are requested by your prospects more frequently than the others. They might be stored locally, or on some cloud storage service. However, as the number of these documents continues to grow, it becomes increasingly harder to keep track of each.
Zoho CRM offers a centralized storage space for all your sales collateral. Your sales team can contribute to and maintain these documents, allowing anyone easy access as and when they need it.
A feed for your ideas
It’s a good idea to be open with your team about the different deals you’re handling and challenges you’re facing. Your peers can offer you valuable tips and insights to help you overcome these challenges and close that one difficult deal.
The Feeds feature in Zoho CRM allows different users to come together and interact. Discuss deals, collaborate on ideas, and broadcast announcements. Have a great sales pitch that you think would be helpful? Share it with the team. You can request or share important sales collateral or update your team on a big deal in a single, centralized space.
Leverage chat for real-time collaborations
As mentioned before, the modern sales environment needs faster collaboration among teams and easy availability of important data. Zoho CRM can integrate with renowned collaboration tools like Zoho Cliq, Slack, and Microsoft Teams to help sales teams work together easily and improve productivity.
Create groups so your sales teams can interact with one another or members of different teams in real time. Share important analytics data from CRM directly with another user or group in chat to keep them updated on the status of new business, or just to celebrate your victories. You can even use workflows to send notifications for important events to users in chat or groups. Pull important information from CRM records using appropriate commands with ease.
Recommended reading: Using CRM telephony to make connections
Virtual customer visits for remote working sales teams
With the advent of video conferencing tools, it has become easier for sales teams to engage with prospects on the other side of the world. Virtual meetings are slowly becoming the norm among sales teams, but it’s become a necessity today more than ever. Interacting with your prospects through video calls has many advantages. The time you would have spent travelling can now be used on preparing a compelling presentation.
Zoho CRM integrates with popular tools like Zoom, Teamviewer, GoToMeeting, Zoho Meeting, and more. It allows your sales teams to set up virtual conferences from inside CRM, invite attendees, conduct meetings, and associate relevant recordings with the event for future reference.
Sales teams can interact with prospects and customers through video conferencing for gathering requirements effectively, showcasing a product demo and more.
Collaborating with your fellow sales reps can help you refine your sales pitches, understand what works and doesn’t work with certain prospects, and help deal with the unique ups and downs of your common profession. Try Zoho CRM, and leverage teamwork to close more deals.
We’d love to hear your thoughts and opinions in the comments on how to sell better when working remotely.
Note: This blog is the third in a series of articles focusing on how our CRM can help you perfect your sales strategy to suit these turbulent times. You can read all the previous articles that have been published as part of the remote sales series here.
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