t happens to the best of us: we misplace a business card, forget to send a follow-up email, or think we’ve been in touch with a sales prospect more recently than we really have been. Then, before you know it, your sales prospect has slipped through the cracks and you’re back to square one. With sales cycles lengthening and wallet size shrinking, there’s no room for error in today’s competitive marketplace . Investing in smart CRM (customer relationship management) technology is essential to stopping lead leakage within your business and accelerating the sales process.
CRM is at the core of sales technology. These systems store customer and prospect contact information, accounts, leads and sales opportunities in one central location, typically the cloud, so this information can be accessed in real time on any device. Here are three hot CRM integrations to accelerate your sales process.
1. Marketing automation software
Marketing automation software is the kingpin of CRM technology. In addition to storing lead and sales opportunities. marketing automation software allows companies to automate basic marketing tasks and workflows. Marketing automation minimizes data entry and improves system efficiency. When it comes to the best marketing automation software available, look for a platform that offers a combination of services including email marketing, social media, SEO analytics and full automation to generate more traffic, leads and sales.
Think you need to be a big business to benefit from marketing automation software? Think again. Marketing automation software helps businesses of all sizes, including small and mid-sized, do more with less.
2. CRM-enabled telephone systems
What if you could automatically log calls as activities in your CRM and match incoming callers to your contact records? Now you can, thanks to synching telephone systems. For example, here at Ringio, we have a have a CRM-enabled PBX phone system that is designed to fit into a sales technology process anchored by CRMs like Salesforce, Zoho, SugarCRM, Highrise, Batchbook and Google Apps.
This sales technology empowers employees to have positive interactions by visually presenting all the relevant data about the customer or prospect on the user’s screen. Knowing who you’re talking to and what they have in mind makes a world of difference when it comes to successfully steering the conversation towards a positive outcome.