Boost sales team productivity and grow revenue with CRM analytics
Time to read: 6 min
Companies worldwide continue to urge their sales teams to do more with less. With a global pandemic, political turmoil, and economic uncertainty, companies need to rethink how to best serve their customers and grow revenue. Business leaders are eager to return to productivity, efficiency, and exceeding revenue goals while also increasing customer and employee satisfaction. The question is how.
Eighty-eight percent of sales reps say current economic conditions make it essential to anticipate customers’ needs. Enter CRM analytics: the game changer. CRM analytics transforms customer information into contextual, actionable, predictive insights that evolve the sales experience. These insights are the catalyst for improving sales KPIs such as:
- Converting new customers faster
- Driving renewals, up-sells, and cross-sells
- Increasing sales with existing customers
- Increasing sales forecast accuracy and effectiveness
- Addressing customer attrition
When companies use CRM analytics tools, predictive and prescriptive customer insights can be made accessible to everyone. Insights delivered in real-time, in the flow of work, enable employees to make better decisions and drive business performance. Organizations that leverage data-driven insights report above-market growth increases of 15-25%.
In this article, we’ll uncover ways sales teams can drive maximum productivity and create efficiency using customer insights gleaned from CRM and other operational and back-office applications.
"There’s no shortage of data out there for any company. The issue is finding the data that you need when you need it."
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9 Sales KPIs Every Sales Team Should Be Tracking
Convert new customers faster with unified data
We know that organizations are using an average of 1,061 different applications to run their business and that 77% of sales reps report needing more time to seek customer insights. Organizations without unified customer profiles have siloed data and fragmented views of their customers. To make sales quickly and increase revenue, providing customer insights in one centralized location is imperative. CRM analytics tools leverage data and insights to help convert new customers faster by quickly identifying trends, like where a product will sell best. Here are other ways your sales teams can use CRM analytics tools to increase revenue and productivity.
Prioritize deal-closing actions. Sales leaders coach reps to identify which opportunities, products, or industries need to be prioritized. A CRM analytics solution will identify patterns so leaders can understand what sales tactics and marketing programs succeed in quickly converting new customers. Understanding and acting on these patterns allow sellers to serve their prospects confidently while being more efficient with their time.
Deliver actionable notifications about deal changes. Sales teams can analyze deal health with AI-powered win predictions and activity metrics, so they know when a deal is at risk and why. Machine learning (ML) models pull data inputs like customer and sales activity, service cases, and related deals to identify potential risks. The insights from this data enable sales teams to stay proactive and address potential issues before they become serious problems.
Having insights in your CRM tool lets sales teams take immediate action and drives consistent sales engagement. Plus, when sales reps don’t have to search multiple platforms for customer information, they can work smarter and faster to optimize every customer engagement, deepen relationships, and increase sales.
CRM Analytics turn increasing and often siloed data into connected, actionable insights. With CRM Analytics, you can:
- Build stronger customer relationships with data
- Bring insights into the flow of work
- Power your business decisions with AI
- Create visual and predictive user experiences that drive consistency in is sales process and engagement
Grow customer relationships by upselling and cross-selling
Sales reps need full visibility into customer profiles to cross-sell and upsell to existing customers. A robust analytics platform connects the CRM and relevant customer transaction data to provide a 360-degree customer view. This can provide reps with information on past purchases, service experience, whitespace, and even buying propensity. With a deeper understanding of their customers, sales teams can create personalized, relevant account and territory approaches.
A unified customer view is also the first step toward educating sales reps to recognize when a specific product should be cross-sold, or when a customer is ready for up-sell. Without it, they may miss out on opportunities where they’d be more likely to succeed if they were informed with data like what a customer might be interested in and why. This allows even new reps to operate like experienced ones.
Sellers can use CRM analytics to uncover upsell and cross-sell opportunities and
- Set alerts that identify customer activities, behavior, and trends
- Use insights to generate more pipelines based on whitespace analysis
- Track the adoption or behavior of an entire customer base to proactively identify patterns and create cross-selling campaigns based on those insights
- Set triggers for customers at a high likelihood to purchase a specific product based on CSAT, activities, or usage/adoption data
With CRM automation and workflows, companies can proactively drive sales engagement against key sales and revenue growth goals.
Salesforce Data Cloud allows customers to bring real-time data to Customer 360. Across any industry, companies can leverage a unified customer profile and real-time data to deliver more personalized experiences to every part of their business.
- Gain a single view of your customers with unified, real-time data across your business.
- Maximize customer touchpoints across every channel with personalized experiences that are interconnected and updated in real-time.
- Empower sales teams with actionable notifications powered by AI that updates every millisecond, to act on deals that are most at risk or on track to close.
- Maintain a real-time customer relationship with automated workflows that respond to every customer interaction with marketing, sales, support, and success teams.
Increase sales forecast accuracy
CRM analytics solutions automate, predict, and guide revenue performance leading to smarter, data-driven selling. Sales teams can focus their energy on growing customer relationships when they have access to updated, accurate forecasts and insights directly in their workflow.
To accelerate how sales teams get and understand data forecasts and insights, a robust CRM analytics solution can empower sellers to
- Get fast insights and leverage best practices with an off-the-shelf user experience that tracks pipeline, pipeline coverage, close rates, leaderboards, and how the pipeline is changing over time every given quarter for any team member.
- Create visibility into the metrics that affect team performance — everything from gap to quota committed forecast, average sale price, win rates, time to close, pipeline coverage, and health. Also, if the CRM analytics solution is native to the CRM system, managers and reps can take action immediately to move deals forward.
- Leverage industry-specific processes and insights delivered in the flow of work to drive consistent behavior across the entire company and achieve performance at scale. For example, manufacturing reps can view sales agreements, rebate performance, and revenue realization. Businesses with recurring revenue models can see propensity-to-churn. Financial services can utilize client segmentation, and consumer goods can manage retail execution.
- Maximize easy-to-use, AI-powered analytics to provide recommendations to close deals faster.
Revenue intelligence uses CRM, analytics, and purpose-built AI to create visibility across the revenue lifecycle so you can be a data-driven seller. With Revenue Intelligence you can:
- Get actionable insights throughout the entire sales and revenue cycle
- Identify winning trends across reps, territories, and customers
- Know where to focus with KPIs and metrics like Pipe Coverage and Gap To Quota
- Forecast the business
- Leverage best practices and speed to value it’s out of the box templates and user experiences
Closing deals faster, upselling, cross-selling, and nurturing existing customer relationships, all while doing more with less, can seem like an insurmountable task. Sales leaders must focus on activities that bring repeatable and predictable revenue to their business. With a CRM analytics platform, sellers and sales managers can make better decisions faster, to better serve their customers and ultimately boost the bottom line.
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