Strong CRM Project Management can lead to greater sales and stronger customer relationships. As a business strategy, Customer Relationship Management is how businesses manage their relationships with their customers. Today's buyer is more informed than ever. They have a world of information at their fingertips and are constantly exposed to ads and marketing tactics wherever they go. Because of this, the balance of power has shifted towards the customer. As such, it's crucial to keep track of leads and customers and nurture them at every stage of their buyer journey.

But managing customer relationships manually is not only time-consuming, but it also becomes evermore impossible as your business grows. So it may be time to say goodbye to energy-consuming spreadsheets. Here's everything you need to know about CRM and Project Management tools.

Basics of CRM Project Management

Ultimately, the goal of CRM Project Management is to improve customer service relationships to drive sales growth and promote customer retention. It's about understanding your customers, what they need and what they're looking for, and accessing the right information when you need it.

Strong customer relationships establish brand loyalty leading to repeat business and increased referrals. In the B2B world, sales can be hard to come by without a defined customer relationship management strategy. Most deals are closed by sales reps making painstaking efforts to convert sales leads into paying customers.

The CRM sales pipeline is simple:

• Prospecting – Now, this is the preliminary research stage. It involves filtering out prospects that don't fit your marketing personas. Marketing to customers who fit your buyer persona is often the key to higher conversion rates.
• Acquisition – Securing leads involves vetting probable buyers and getting ready to make contact. As such, it’s crucial to have as much detailed information as possible to create the right impression right from the start.
• Conversion – This is where you nurture leads and build enough trust in your brand to convert them into customers. It involves convincing your customer that your services are worth the investment without coming on too strong.

After making a sale, the challenge is to provide stellar customer support and ensure your customers feel valued. This way, they become repeat customers and drive referrals. So how do you manage the project after they become a customer? Keep reading, we'll get there.

What Makes a Good CRM Project Management Solution?

CRM project management systems were designed to address the issue of customer data. Every time sales personnel answers a customer query online, follows a promising lead, or talk to a prospect on the phone; they learn something new and potentially invaluable about a certain demographic of customers. CRM project management tools provide a means to track, analyze, and use this data.

CRM tools help ensure accuracy and efficiency, allowing the sales process to be informed by useful, actionable insights rather than data. With a CRM project management system in place, every past interaction, every meeting held and presentation delivered, and every preference of a customer is instantly available. It's a tool that makes it easy to learn about your customers, manage follow-ups and create a buyer journey designed to entice at every stage.

But there are plenty of CRM project management solutions in the industry, and it can be hard to determine which tool fits your business best. What’s more, there is a distinctive difference between tools designed specifically for project management and those designed for customer relationship management.

Using a Project Management Tool/Software for Customer Relationship Management

Project management software combines project planning, budget management, and advanced collaboration tools to help you deliver projects successfully. With project management software, you can effectively plan and schedule team tasks, eliminate unnecessary costs, and track milestones.

When applied to CRM, project management software can be quite useful. It can help with the following:

• Portfolio management to determine and help retain your most valuable customers or clients
• Visual project management, centralizing communication, and ensuring your team can better understand tasks, timelines, and KPIs.
• Improve project and team productivity

Outside of a CRM, the advantage of using project management software is that you can easily move activities through different stages. It allows teams to understand their roles as well as project progress. You can create Gantt charts to manage project schedules and ensure milestones are reached on time. Combining CRM and project management usually will mean the really in depth project management features are not included, if those are required you may need two systems.

That said, project management tools are not necessarily equipped to handle customer support, marketing automation, or customer data collection. For instance, you cannot view or track the full history of customer communications such as emails, texts, and calls with a project management software. These features are in-built in CRM tools so you can better manage customer needs and expectations throughout their buyer journey. Because of this, project management software may not offer the full range of features you need to actively nurture customer relationships. But an all-in-one solution that combines both project management and customer relationship management features could just fill in the gaps.

Here are three key benefits of an all-in-one solution.

1. Better data management

The goal of data collection and management, in this case, is to improve customer satisfaction. As such, your company can better understand the success of marketing campaigns and cater better to your customers' needs and wants.

1. Improved deliverables

CRM systems allow you to organize various aspects of your business, from marketing campaigns to project management. They automate workflows, allowing your sales and marketing teams to focus on more strategic activities, such as testing different marketing approaches to create sales strategies and marketing campaigns that resonate. In-built project management features ensure that your team is on the same page, in turn creating more efficient customer care processes.

1. Cross-departmental alignment

It's not unusual to find the sales and marketing teams unaligned in their goals. With an all-in-one tool, you can bring your project management, customer service, sales, and marketing team together. Doing so can help you better align objectives across departments and create a shared understanding of customer and marketing program needs.

Looking for expert help getting started with a CRM? Contact us today.

There are football playbooks, business playbooks, and even theater playbooks to ensure success. So, it’s a no-brainer that a sales playbook is needed to help a rep master the sales process and close deals more efficiently. These handy guides are terrific tools for empowering your sales team to consistently bring your sales strategies to life out in the field.

In this post, we’re looking at what a sales playbook is, why you need it, and how to craft and deploy one your reps will actually use.

What is a Sales Playbook?

Sales playbooks outline how reps should execute a company’s sales strategy in a predictable and replicable way through every stage of the buyer’s journey. While many companies use it primarily to onboard new sales reps, there are numerous advantages to creating a “living” playbook your entire sales team can reference.

1. All sales reps are equally empowered to implement your sales strategy during customer interactions.
2. You create a hive mentality where team members feel motivated to share more effective tactics with fellow reps.
3. Generating sales scripts, messages, and other selling strategies give your team more time to do what they do best, selling, because they don’t need to generate their own sales strategy materials.
4. When everyone on the sales team uses the same sales technology, the sales process is clear, concise, and easy to follow, preventing time-consuming missteps.

A standardized sales playbook also helps your team eliminate poor leads so they can spend more time on qualified ones, focusing on what ultimately makes or breaks any sale: solving a customer’s pain points.

Why Reps Often Ignore Sales Playbooks

Every year companies pour millions of dollars into researching and crafting sales playbooks filled with (mostly) great content. They hold well-attended launch webinars and feel confident they’re on the path to breaking prior sales records.

Fast forward six months, and they’re asking themselves why their sales reps aren’t referencing the playbook and don’t seem interested in getting updates. Here’s the truth. Good sales reps must see value in using something, or they’re not going to invest in it. In other words, if they see your sales playbook as just another boring or superficial manual, they’ll give it a pass.

Modern sales playbooks must reflect specific situations and deliver content in context. Here’s how to do just that.

Sales Playbook Examples: What to Include

A Salesforce report found that high-performing sales teams are 2.3 times more likely to use guided selling than underperforming teams. Guided selling processes like sales playbooks accelerate the sales process, enabling sales reps to perform more efficiently—and it works regardless of what product or service is being sold or who the buyer is.

These sales playbook examples contain information essential to the success of your sales team.

1. Overview of the organization’s sales goals, including a brief description of the company’s sales philosophy and mission, as well as an organizational chart with names and job titles, rules of the office, and onboarding schedule.
2. Breakdown of sales rep responsibilities that explains how tasks are divided between sales team roles, ensuring everyone knows what’s expected of them.
3. Buyer personas, so sales reps have a deep understanding of the company's ideal customer, including how they go about the buying process. It should include detailed information on makes potential buyers qualified leads, including pain points, spending budget, size of company, etc.
4. Product offerings. Sales reps must be thoroughly knowledgeable about what they're selling. Along with product features, they should know pricing information, each product or service’s unique value proposition, and similar competitor offerings.\

1. Sales process rundown that outlines the company’s sales process workflow as well as the ideal length of the sales cycle.
2. CRM platform guide that is less a tutorial and more a rundown on how its tools are incorporated into the sales process.
3. Compensation guidelines, including how sales reps are paid and how incentives and commissions work.
4. Sales resource list, including marketing materials, customer testimonials, and case studies. Use sales “plays” to walk reps through the actions and best practices proven to move deals forward.
5. Metrics overview describing which key performance indicators (KPIs) and other metrics are critical to hitting sales goals.

Streamline the Sales Cycle with On-Course

A sales playbook is an essential tool for everyone involved in your company’s sales process. The best ones are concise, easy to use, and provide step-by-step guidance on closing more—and more lucrative—deals.

On-Course in a multi-tiered CRM that helps you build the ultimate sales playbook by defining your sales processes and giving your sales team what they need to take on new challenges and close deals successfully. Sign up today to get started.

Sales managers differ from other types of managers in that they only have one focus: increasing sales to existing and potential clients or customers to boost revenue. It takes specific sales manager skills to achieve exceptional results and help a business succeed, including the ability to inspire and motivate people to accomplish more.

What is a Sales Manager?

Sales managers are in charge of leading a company’s sales team and are responsible for:

• Helping their team meet sales quotas.
• Forecasting sales.
• Running sales reports.
• Providing mentorship and training.
• Recruiting, hiring, and onboarding new sales team members.

Some people assume that a sales team member with the highest sales record is the ideal candidate for a sales manager role. However, the role has much more to do with leadership abilities than personal sales numbers.

9 Sales Manager Skills to Grow On

As a sales manager, you need certain skills to help you perform your duties with greater efficiency and ease. Let’s look at the top nine sales manager skills.

1. Hiring the right talent

Even if you inherit an existing sales team, there will come the day when you need to add or replace reps. Hiring people who are motivated and passionate about what you’re selling should be a top priority as it can:

• Bring in substantial revenue quickly.
• Generate more revenue through better client relations.
• Help boost your reputation.
• Ensure your product or service becomes a leader in your sector.

2. Leadership

To be a successful leader, a sales manager should possess qualities like the ability to lead by example, coach and mentor, and earn trust. They know how to communicate clear expectations, don’t overcomplicate processes, and do more leading and less micro-managing. Their sole goal should be to create an environment for sales success.

3. Developing sales plans

Sales managers are tasked with fulfilling set sales quotas and are expected to contribute to a business’s growth by using insights and analytics to make data-driven decisions. They outline sales processes and best practices for their sales agents to follow and set target markets and quotas for their team. Some also determine the channels their sales reps will use to close deals.

4. Communication skills

The ability to communicate clearly and openly is a skill all managers need. Sales managers must not only use “sales speak” when communicating with their reps but must also understand each team member well enough to communicate in the way they need individually. It’s a skill essential to ensuring individual sales reps understand the goals, visions, objectives, and strategies and are aware of the role they play in meeting them.

5. Organizational skills

Planning and organizing skills go hand-in-hand for sales managers who must decide which direction their sales team will take to ensure success. It’s a well-known fact that poor organization can lead to missed opportunities and lower productivity. A good sales manager knows how to get and keep everything and everyone on track to meet sales goals.

6. Sales forecasting

Most sales leaders say there’s always room for improvement when it comes to sales forecasting. Good sales forecasting skills sales managers must possess to succeed include:

• Distinguishing between forecasting and pipeline management.
• Leading their sales team to forecast based on facts, not assumptions.
• Selecting an appropriate forecasting framework based on sales roles.

7. Delegation

Effective sales managers use their sales team’s potential to achieve organizational goals. They know when and how to delegate responsibilities to enhance productivity and drive profits. They don’t burden themselves with responsibilities they know individual sales reps are perfectly capable of performing. Most importantly, they understand each team member’s strengths and weaknesses, which allows them to better delegate and support the team’s overall success.

8. Social selling skills

It’s estimated that less than half of salespeople use social media for prospecting, interacting with customers, or gathering data. That’s unfortunate, because in a world where most of their customers and clients are spending considerable time online, they’re missing out on the power of social to help them relate to and engage with buyers. Social selling lets you leverage your social network to find the right leads, build trusted relationships, and achieve your sales goals. It can also decrease cold calling and boost your lead generation and sales prospecting strategies.

9. Customer relationship management

A customer relationship management system (CRM) gives you insight into key factors like what the pipeline and sales rep performance looks like. It helps you manage a sales team's relationships and interactions with existing and prospective customers and continuously updates account information so you can manage contacts, sales, and agent productivity better.

On-Course in a multi-tiered CRM that helps you streamline the entire sales cycle while helping you build better customer relationships and meet sales quotas. Ready to learn more? Come see for yourself how easy it is to get started on improving your organization’s sales team performance.

Creating catchy email subject lines for sales can be loads of fun, but if you want to increase your customer base and profits, they also need to get clicks. And in a world where more than 125 billion business emails are sent and received each day, that’s not as easy as it sounds.

Everyone knows cluttered email inboxes are nearly impossible to stay on top of. Competition is stiff, and when it comes to getting someone to open your email, the odds are often against you. To save time, most people scroll down their inboxes to spot emails that look important. So, how do you ensure your emails stand out from the hundreds of others your prospects are receiving? It starts with a compelling subject line.

How Important Are Email Subject Lines?

We’re glad you asked, as the subject line is potentially the most important few words in the entire email! It’s your one chance to make a great first impression, get your foot in the door, and engage the lucky recipient.

It’s estimated that 64% of email recipients decide to open an email based on the subject line. If it doesn’t strike their fancy, they’re likely to delete it immediately. They’re also inclined to delete emails where the subject line uses all caps, overuses exclamation points, or any other spammy tactic.

A good email subject line has but one purpose: to get someone to think or say, “tell me more.”

Try These Catchy Email Subject Lines for Sales

Well-designed and coordinated email campaigns can quickly build momentum for your sales initiatives. When someone receives your email, they’ll typically spend a few seconds deciding whether to open it. This is where a catchy subject line comes into play.

These catchy email subject line examples should inspire you to create campaigns that people notice and emails they click on.

Let’s start with some sales email subject lines that, at this point, have lost all meaning or power to engage:

1. How can we help you?
2. Just checking in.
3. Can we have 5 seconds of your time?
4. This is our last attempt at contacting you.
5. Forget the tricks, we have a treat for you!

These email subject lines, and many more like them, fail for the most part because they don’t make the value of your email body obvious. Numbers 4 and 5 are particularly egregious. We all know that when someone says, “this is our last email,” that we’ll get another one just like it next week. And while everyone appreciates a touch of humor, far too many subject line writers sacrifice clarity for cleverness, much of which falls flat.

Your aim should be to compose subject lines that create a sense of urgency and exclusivity. Consider these examples, which apply to different types of sales email campaigns:

Urgency and scarcity

• “Our limited-time promotion ends in 24 hours.”
• “We know you’re busy, but we don’t want you to miss out.”
• “Our latest webinar’s airing free for the next 24 hours.”
• “Drop everything—we’re having a sale!

Pain point

• “Five fast fixes for sales funnel frustration.”
• “Are you struggling with XYZ? You’re not alone.”
• “How happy are you with your current project management tool?”
• “5 ways we can jumpstart your digital transformation.”

Personalized appeals

• “Hey, Stef! Our product has your name written all over it.”
• “Joe, we’d love your input/feedback.”
• “Hi, Julie, have you tried our XYZ?”

Cold outreach

• “3 reasons you should be using our service, not theirs.”
• “We have the perfect opportunity for you and your marketing team.”
• “I’ve got an idea for solving your lead generation woes.”

Whether you claim one of these as your own or use them as a jumping-off point, here’s how to make sure your sales email subject lines are effective every time:

1. Use keywords whenever possible
2. Keep them short and to the point
3. Ask open-ended questions or include deadlines
4. Avoid spammy words and phrases
5. Test whether using emojis lead to more open rates

Finally, think about whether you would open an email with your intended subject line. If you wouldn’t click on it yourself, don’t assume prospective customers will either!

How a CRM Streamlines Email Marketing

Combining CRM and email marketing is the ideal way to create targeted campaigns that optimize relationships with existing and potential customers. OnCourse provides the data and information you need to scale communication and create personalized copy that puts the focus on the recipient, not a generic audience. The result is higher conversion rates, more engaged customers, and better profits.

Ready to learn more? Come see just how easy it is to get started.

Want to scale your sales team quickly? The road to success is lined with data.

Sales teams with high-quality account, contact, and lead data are better equipped to make crucial decisions, chart course corrections, and direct focus.

Sales data includes everything from revenue by lead source to number of deals and cost of sales. If you’re collecting data on customer interactions—as we like to believe you are—you can use it to learn an incredible amount about prospects and customers.

Why You Need a Data-Driven Sales Team

Research consistently shows that data-driven companies dramatically outperform their competitors and are:

• 23 times more likely to acquire new customers
• 6 times as likely to retain them
• Nearly 20 times more likely to be profitable

So, what’s the secret of turning data into more customers, sales, and revenue? The answer lies in tracking the right KPIs and metrics and understanding the difference between the two.

Sales KPIs vs. Sales Metrics

KPIs and metrics are related, but they’re not the same. For while all KPIs are metrics, not all metrics are KPIs.

• KPIs or key performance indicators are the metrics by which you measure business-critical initiatives, goals, and objectives. Put another way, they’re measurable benchmarks against defined goals. For instance, if your goal is to increase sales by 20% over the next year, KPIs you’ll want to look at include new customer acquisition, upselling success rate, and customer churn.

• Metrics measure overall business health. They’re loosely tied to targeted objectives but aren’t always a good indication you’re on track to meet goals. For example, tracking website visitors is a metric, but unless you tie it to a specific key business objective, it forever remains “just a metric,” not a KPI.

Successful data-driven enterprises use both metrics and KPIs to improve business outcomes and enhance their sales strategies.

Sales KPIs Every Leader Should Measure

We mentioned earlier that you need to track the “right” sales KPIs. Which ones they are depends on your business. To avoid overwhelming your sales team with useless data, begin by measuring these seven KPIs first.

1. Number of qualified leads. This is your most important sales KPI to track as it helps you understand whether a lead has real value or not.
2. Percentage of leads generated. This KPI lets you know if sales reps are reaching established quotas and can help you determine if quotas are set too high or low.
3. Lead response time. You get three valuable insights here: are reps following up with leads in a timely fashion? Do they follow up in a way that follows your established sales process? Is there any unnecessary friction you should eliminate from the lead routing process?
4. Email open rates. When you track sent sales emails, types of emails, and open rates, you get to see the level at which prospects are regularly engaging with your campaigns.
5. Call-show rate. How often are booked sales presentations showing up for the call? If the show rate is below 50%, there’s an issue that needs solving, be it the sales approach or customer hesitation.
6. Conversion drip. You should understandably be pleased if your reps are closing 30% of their calls. But where did the other 70% go? Though they’re certainly all not winnable, it’s likely at least ten to 15% of them are.
7. Customer acquisition rate. This is a terrific way to determine at which point sales reps should move on. It also helps you compare different outreach methods like cold calling, emailing, and face-to-face interactions.

Moving forward, you can add other KPIs like pipeline velocity, deals by acquisition channel, and monthly sales growth.

Sales and CRM Data

Many people think of CRM systems only as a way to improve customer service or efficiency, but they’re missing out on a big part of the full value of CRM. Whether you have a sales team of five or a dozen, customer relationship management software makes it easier for your sales team to keep connected with the best leads and existing customers.

A purpose-built CRM helps you dramatically increase sales results and turn prospects into long-term profitable customers. OnCourse is a multi-tiered support system that offers numerous features for optimizing the sales process, including:

• An intuitive, easy-to-use interface
• Email and activity tracking
• Email sequences and templates
• Built-in calling
• Game-changing SMS

It offers a simple way to manage all things sales-related in one place, using powerful automation to accelerate your sales efforts and dramatically increase team productivity while giving you access to all the sales data you need to boost revenue. Bypass the sales team, come see how easy it is to sign up yourself!

Good discovery questions take a bit of a Goldilocks approach. Ask too many, and you risk running an interrogation. Ask too few, and you might not discover your prospect’s true pain points. But ask just the right ones, and you hit the sweet spot of discovery.

Experts recommend agents aim for between 11 and 14 discovery questions per a typical sales call (fewer if selling to a C-suite executive). So, here are 13 of our favorite sales discovery calls designed to help you unearth precisely what your customers want and need.

Top 13 Sales Discovery Questions

Discovery questions are how you uncover critical sales information in the sales cycle. It’s your first opportunity to talk to a qualified prospect about whether your product or service is a good fit. That makes it critical to ask the right discovery questions during this phase of the sales process.

So, let’s dive right in on what to ask your leads in your information-gathering calls.

Question 1: What Initially Piqued Your Interest in Us?

Lobbing a softball question at the start helps you uncover a lead’s motivations for checking out your product or service. Sometimes a prospect will give you enough information in their response to this question that you can skip to more complex questions more quickly.

Question 2: What Problem Are You Trying to Solve?

It’s just as important to disqualify leads as it is to qualify them. This question lets you determine whether a prospect is a good candidate for what you offer early in the call. For instance, if a lead tells you they’re just “exploring their options,” they’re unlikely ready to move forward in the sales process immediately.

Question 3: How Are You Managing the Problem Now?

Once you know the problem a prospect is trying to solve, you need to understand why their current solution isn’t working. Did they choose another product that wasn’t up to the task, or do budget constrictions prevent them from buying yours? The goal’s to ferret out whether your product would work better so you aren’t left trying to force a square peg into a round hole.

Question 4: What Metrics Are You Measuring?

Organizations buy solutions for all sorts of reasons which means they have different metrics they measure to determine if they’re succeeding in their goals. If they can’t list measurable goals, it could be a red flag, as it becomes more difficult for you to promise your solution will work.

Question 5: Have You Explored Other Options?

Asking a prospect where they are in the evaluation process gives you two critical pieces of information: a lead’s timeline and the competitors you’re up against. Follow-up questions might include, “When do you want the solution in place,” or “Which other companies are you talking to?”

Question 6: Are You the Sole Decision Maker?

Most companies require multiple people to weigh in on critical decisions, so it’s likely the prospect on your discovery call isn’t the only stakeholder in your deal. By asking, “Who else on your team will be involved in the evaluation process,” you ensure getting facetime with all decision-makers.

Question 7: How Will Our Product or Services Benefit Your Company?

Introducing a new solution can result in everything from risk mitigation to financial changes and strategic choices. Knowing these anticipated benefits helps you see the value your solution will provide.

Question 8: Do You Have Other Priorities You Need to Manage First?

Does the prospect have a pressing issue, or is it something they don’t need to solve immediately? If the problem isn’t time-bound, you might be able to help them with other issues they’re trying to solve.

Question 9: What Alternative Solutions Have You Looked Into?

This question is less about revealing competitors and more about discovering whether or not a lead has alternative ways of solving their problem. Knowing what these alternatives are let you better understand how to pitch your solution as the most valuable.

Question 10: How Does Our Solution Compare to Those Others?

Understanding who and what you’re up against is crucial to closing a deal. The aim here is to determine if a prospect finds another company’s solution more compelling than yours and whether your production or service would help them more. If not, it’s best to move on to the next lead.

Question 11: What Do You Think the Roadblocks Are to Implementing Our Solution?

This is more of a disqualifying question. Remember, you only have so much selling time in a day, week, or month. The lead’s response will give you a good idea of whether pursuing the prospect is worth any more of your effort.

Question 12: If It Sounds Like Our Solution Will Work, What Is Your Company’s Approval Process?

The answer to this question gives you a roadmap of what it takes for your lead to approve your product. Consider this a final attempt to extract any more useful information from the prospect, and use their answer to determine whether everyone’s ready to move forward on the deal.

Question 13: What Would You Suggest as Our Next Step?

This last discovery question gets a prospect to move the deal forward. You can also discover what hurdles could delay the process or stop it from happening altogether.

Want to learn how a CRM solution like OnCourse can help you create a centralized location for discovery information and lead to more closed deals? Sign up today!

Every salesperson must understand overcoming objections in sales in order to deal with the struggles of an objecting customer. Objections can be derailing, sometimes blunt, and emotion-provoking. When such happens, you are more likely to lose your authoritative sales figure, become defensive, and lose potential customers.

Most sales professionals have been trained to tackle everyday challenges, like dealing with frugal and insistent buyers, disinterested customers, etc. You can always anticipate likely objections from these prospects from the very moment you interact with them and even launch a counter-attack to win back their trust for that win-win solution.

However, not all objections are the same. Some may come unexpectedly and will leave you without a response. If you’ve faced some unexpected customer criticism before, then you know how overwhelming things can get. We’ve rounded up some examples of customer doubts, disapprovals, and complaints and how you will be overcoming objections and handle them as a super sales professional.

Overcoming Objections in Sales: Examples and Possible Solutions

The selling process can be challenging, and if you have tried selling anything before, you know that a prospect can come up with any reason not to buy your product. The details for these objections will vary, from complaints about the price and lack of need to lack of urgency, etc. A great salesperson will use these objections as a gateway to the higher realms – an opportunity to listen to the prospect, understand their needs and give them what they want.

So what are some of the common or rather uncommon sales objections that you’ll likely face in the market? The truth is, they are uncountable. We’ve highlighted the most significant below.

Lack of Budget

If your lead tells you they have no money, their budget is low, or your pricing is too high, you want to drive the conversation in the right direction. It’s easy to object and explain how your competitors have the same prices and so forth, but you’ll have lost it. Instead, assure the prospect that you understand their concerns, then go ahead to explain how investing in the product/service (risk) justifies the benefits they will get (reward).

Trust Issues

If your business, product, or services are relatively new in the market, it’s common for leads to say they have not heard of your company or products yet. This is a genuine concern since reputation and market competence are key to doing business. Perhaps they don’t want to make the wrong choices and be blamed for it. A solution would be to prove your authority in the market by providing testimonials, genuine customer reviews, etc. Building trust isn’t lip-service, so you want your actions and past wins to do the talking.

A Lack of Motivation

The motivation to make a purchase decision comes from two things – need and urgency. If your prospects say, “this product will not help us,” maybe they are right, or perhaps you need to listen and help them figure out the very need they have missed. A good way to track the prospects’ needs and overcoming objections in sales is to use layered and open-ended questions. Get to know their goals, values, challenges and use them to demonstrate the unmet value and how your product or service will help.

On the other hand, a lack of urgency will have your prospect debate on how your timing is wrong or why you should wait for a couple of months or years, etc. To tackle this objection, you want to know your clients’ competing priorities, short and long-term objectives, pressing pain points, etc. Highlighting these areas can help both of you discover the urgent need to deploy your products/services for their own good.

Overcoming Unexpected Objections in Sales

The objections we’ve highlighted above can be relatively easy to handle, provided you have some experience dealing with different personalities in the sales business. However, some objections require high levels of self-awareness, empathy, and negotiation skills to turn the situations around. We’ve rounded up some of them below.

• “Your competitor’s product is better than yours.” – This is an opportunity for self-reflection and to uncover the diamonds in the rough. Highlight your competitive advantages and why you are interested in doing business with them. Keep it firm but modest. Other objections in this category include, “I’m already working with this competitor,” we could work together, but your product is,” “I’m happy with this other company,” etc.
• “I can’t help you. You’ll need to talk to so and so.” – This is a roadblock you could solve by being realistic and weighing the options at hand. If the person is just not interested, get to the bottom of the problem and buy them into a conversation. Otherwise, you should ask them to direct you to the person in charge.
• “How did you get my email or contact information. We are not interested.” – A solution is to be honest, then listen to the prospects to understand their needs and perspectives of things before pitching your products/services. If you do this right, you stand a chance to change their attitudes.

Conclusion

Customer objections are not anything new in the sales industry, and how you approach them makes all the difference. It’s not uncommon to meet arrogant or rigid prospects who won’t change their thinking no matter what, but luckily, the ball is often on your court. Remember, an objecting prospect is an interested customer who’s not yet convinced you are the right buy. Take your time to sharpen your skills, and when an opportunity comes along, seize it!

Cold calling scripts are undoubtedly one of the essential tools in the sales process. According to a LinkedIn survey, 27% of sales representatives agree that making cold calls using scripts to new and prospective buyers is exceptionally effective. When utilized correctly and written in the right way, they can help you gain more opportunities, grow your revenue, and drastically reduce your sales cycle length.

The best practices of creating scripts meant for cold calling have changed due to the advancement in new technologies. Luckily, the principles of human behavior that govern an effective script have not changed. Thus, this guide will delve into the latest and most effective tips for creating cold calling scripts with samples to get you started.

Creating Your Cold Calling Scripts

A compelling script for cold calling must be likable, engaging, and intriguing on the phone and build rapport with your prospective customer. A well-designed script enables you to hit all the necessary hallmarks to turn a cold call into a warm one. Here are the scriptwriting tips that will enrich your cold calling prospects, whether B2B or SaaS sales.

1. Identify Cold Calling Prospects

It's essential to identify the ideal prospects to call beforehand to improve your cold calling prospects. Doing your research upfront ensures that you don't waste your time cold calling prospects that aren't a good fit for your products. Look for prospective customers who have common attributes to those you've had success with in the past.

LinkedIn is one great resource that you can use to find out a little about your prospect. Look at the university they went to, see whether you have mutual connections, and their job titles to find something you can talk to them about when you call. Identifying cold calling prospects beforehand will increase your chances of making a successful cold call.

2. Break the Ice

The first cold call you make is a perfect opportunity to demonstrate your skills, knowledge, and why a prospect should purchase from you. Thus, make sure the connection counts, offer something special immediately, and highlight how you add value to your prospect's organization. In addition, use a credibility statement, give specific and detailed information, describe your product, or throw in their competitor's name in your conversation to warm up a cold call.

Three Cold Calling Scripts You Can Customize

Here're three cold calling scripts that you can customize according to your situation to break the ice with a gatekeeper:

Credibility Statement: "Hello, my name is [Your Name], I am calling from [Your Company's Name] here in New York. I specialize in developing .NET software for financial companies here in New York City."

Give Detailed Information: "I noticed that you were recently appointed the manager of analytics in your company. Therefore, I'm giving you a call because our software directly connects with your CRM to display key performance metrics and business intelligence driven by your manufacturing process' data."

Describe your Product: "I'm calling because our company offers self-run and fully self-managed cleaning services that are 100% OHSA compliant for your restaurant, which includes kitchen, dining, and bathrooms, all in one service that doesn't require work for you or your staff."

3. Ask Open-Ended Questions

When writing your cold call script, it's important not to assume your prospects' profile. Instead, it would be wise to find a creative way to get your prospective customers to open up and reveal their profiles. Open-ended questions allow your prospects to fill the void in your knowledge, which helps you tailor your sales process to address their pain points.

Here are some of the open-ended questions that you can incorporate in your cold calling script:

• What's the main problem that your company is facing at the moment?
• What would be your ideal solution?
• What are the KPIs you consult before making a purchase?

4. Anticipate and Embrace Objections

Objection and rejection are part and parcel of the cold calling process. Nonetheless, most prospective customers raise objections around the issues of pricing, budget, and competitors. Thus, when designing your cold calling script, you must prepare your responses to objections in advance to ensure you make a close.

Even though rejections can be a morale-bruiser, you shouldn't take them personally. Just focus on making the close. Here's a script of how you can respond to rejections:

Prospect: I'm not interested at the moment. I don't think it can work for us.

You: I fully understand. But, I'm curious to know why you feel that way since we have had much success with [Another Company]. Could you help me understand why you don't think it fits your company?

5. Concentrate on Your Value

Your script meant for cold calling must conclusively explain in detail the value that your products or services bring to the table. Thus, the script must demonstrate how your solution will help the prospect, the benefits that they can expect by working with you, and, essentially, why they should care. Ensure you put across your value regardless of whether the prospect is happy with your solution or not so that you can close the deal.

To communicate your value effectively, call your prospect by name in a welcoming tone and explain to them the reason for the call. More so, build a bridge by connecting the reason for the call and why they should give you their ears. Consequently, ask the prospect for what you want and keep quiet.

Wrapping It Up

It's worth noting that a cold calling script is just a guide that helps you be effective in the cold calling process. Luckily, these scripts aren't meant to be rigid sales tools that dictate how your cold calling should flow. Making them as conversational as possible will significantly improve your chances of creating a meaningful connection with your prospect.

Inside Sales vs. Outside Sales. Over the past decades, businesses worldwide have used the outside sales model to sell their products and services. Nonetheless, companies are increasingly incorporating inside sales in their enterprises due to advancements in communication technology. According to a Havard Business Review survey, 46% of vice presidents of sales at leading companies reported a shift from an outside sales model to an inside sales model over the past two years.

As a sales lead, it’s crucial to fully understand these two sales models to build an effective sales force. This article will delve deeper into everything you need to know about inside and outside sales, their differences, and how a user-friendly CRM can help you manage both models.

What is inside sales?

Like its name suggests, Inside sales is a sales model that focuses on selling services or products to prospect customers remotely. As an inside sales representative, you primarily conduct sales over the phone in your office. But, due to advancements in modern communication technology, you can use a wide array of modern communication tools that are readily available. The inside sales model is effectively used in Business to Business (B2B) and Software as a Service (SaaS) sales.

What is outside sales?

The outside sales model solely focuses on selling products and services to prospects through face-to-face meetings held outside the sales representative’s office. These in-person meetings occur at a convenient location to your potential customers, such as in a restaurant or trade show. You can effectively use outside sales in Business to Business (B2B) sales, especially where your products or services have a premium price point.

The Contrast between Inside Sales and Outside Sales

Although both inside and outside sales models share a similar end goal, they differ in certain aspects. These differences include:

1. Communication Tools

Inside sales involve contacting prospective clients remotely using modern communication tools such as emails, video calls, phone calls, etc. These communication tools can prove a hard nut to crack in managing them. That’s why you must have a user-friendly CRM, like OnCourse CRM, to help you manage and track your emails, phone calls, video calls, and messages.

On the other hand, outside sales involve traveling to different destinations searching for potential clients and new business. Thus, the sales model solely depends on the traditional communication channels like traveling and face-to-face meetings.

1. The Prices of the Product or Service

Inside and outside sales models are crafted to sell products and services at different prices. Inside sales is only viable in businesses that sell less expensive and low-profit margin products or services. This is because the model has low operational costs and requires less persuasion than the outside sales.

The outside sales model, on its part, is time-consuming and involves high operational costs due to the traveling involved. Thus, the sales model is best suited for businesses that sell expensive products or services with high-profit margins. In addition, the deal sizes of the outside sales should involve large sums of money to make financial sense.

1. The Length of the Sales Cycle

As stated earlier, while using the inside sales model, you only need to make a call to a prospect and lay bare your case. Thus, the time required to persuade a potential client is considerably low compared to traveling and organizing a meeting with a potential client. That’s why inside sales have a shorter length of the sales cycle.

On the other hand, outside sales involve traveling, meeting with the client, and constantly maintaining contact. That’s why you need a considerable amount of time to persuade a prospective client to make a purchase. This explains why outside sales have a longer sale cycle length than inside sales.

1. Close Rates

Inside sales have a lower close rate, focusing on less expensive products and products with a low-profit margin. Thus, prospective buyers don’t need much thought in deciding on whether to make a purchase or not. Your only focus should be on contacting a lead with a high volume.

Conversely, outside sales have a high customer conversion rate because it focuses on expensive and high-profit margin products and services. Thus, prospective clients take a lot of time in deciding whether to invest their hefty cash in your products or not. Therefore, it makes sense to spend as much time as possible with a prospect provided you close the deal.

The Bottom Line

As you will have noticed by now, both inside and outside sales have strong and weak points. Incorporating a hybrid of both sales models in your sales strategy is ideal if you intend to make the best of both worlds. The inside sales is cost-effective and more scalable, but if your business deals with enterprise customers with a longer sales cycle, outside sales is an ideal choice.

To build connections with prospects and customers, a salesperson must go far beyond negotiating their products and services’ prices and features; the focus must be on a lead’s interests and needs. In this article, we talk about consultative selling, including what it is and how you can use it to close more deals.

Consultative Selling: It’s All About Relationships

Best-selling sales author Jeffrey Gitomer put it best when he said, “People don’t like to be sold, but they love to buy!”

A simple example of consultative selling is the clerk at the wine shop who asks you what you’ll be drinking the wine with. The Apple Store also uses the technique, with its knowledgeable staff trained to suggest the best product for each customer’s unique needs. Successful consultative salespeople consistently close deals by asking potential buyers the right questions to match them with their ideal product or service. Not-so-successful sales reps spend their time trying to close the deal, even when it’s apparent what they’re selling isn’t what you need.

The consultative selling process might take a little more time upfront, but when you put relationships first and worry about selling your product or service later, you build long-term trust that translates into repeat and referral business.

Consultative Selling Best Practices

To win deals through consultative selling, you must align process and human components. The typical consultative sales process is made up of six stages:

1. Target and qualify
2. Explore and assess
3. Develop a solution
4. Present solution and follow-up
5. Negotiate and close
6. Implement and follow-through

Each stage has a defined objective, tools, customer actions, and best practice activities that line up with the buyer’s journey. Let’s look at the steps a sales rep using the consultative approach can take to build strong relationships with customers.

Ask the Right Questions

Think of this as in-depth prospect research where you uncover as much information about your lead’s needs as possible. Before calling a potential customer, educate yourself on the size of their company and its number of employees, average sales, typical product or service offerings, and target market. Search sites like LinkedIn for news about the company that sheds light on the problems the company faces. These steps take time, but you can use a CRM and other sales tools to speed up the process.

When you’re ready for a live conversation, ask questions that help you determine whether what a customer thinks they need actually aligns with what they truly need. This information helps ensure whatever solution you recommend solves your prospect’s problem and establishes you as a trusted resource.

Learn to Read Between The Lines

Every customer’s needs are different, and no two interactions with a prospect are the same. You might have to lead the conversation in a direction that draws out key information you need to find the best solution. For instance, a prospect might say they want an updated reporting system, but verbal and non-verbal cues they send during your conversation points to an inefficient data gathering process. You can then share case studies about how you’ve helped other businesses improve their reporting by updating their knowledge management system.

Educate Potential Customers

We’re not talking about educating prospects on your products or services. You want to act as a consultant, not a sales rep, by sharing information that’s more industry-related. Now’s the time to use your expertise to help a lead use what they already know to make educated decisions about what they need. You might provide them with related examples from your experience, a detailed plan for tackling their challenges, or suggestions for addressing related problems.

Personalize Your Consultative Approach

Each prospect requires a solution tailored to their problem. You don’t want to pressure a lead into purchasing your goods or services. Rather, you should naturally suggest throughout the conversation how certain features might meet their needs. To build a case that your solution is worth it, ask yourself:

• How can I customize what I’m offering to match this prospect’s unique needs?
• What additional services or products can I provide?
• Can I offer any discounts or promotions to close the deal?

Your guiding principle should be to focus on being authentic with each prospect. Look at yourself as a trusted adviser and not as a sales rep, and you’ll build positive, mutually beneficial customer relationships that last for years.

The right sales tools can help make the consultative sales process more efficient and successful. A sale automation platform like OnCourse streamlines and automates sales processes so you can meet your customers’ needs while growing your bottom line. Ready to learn how? Head here to sign up today or contact us with any questions you might have.

As you stroll down the street, a stylish t-shirt catches your eye, and you pause to admire it. You’ve never been to this particular shop, but decide to walk in and try the tee on. You love it, hand over your payment to the cashier, and walk out of the store a happy customer.

Congratulations, you just completed the customer journey, aka the sales funnel!

What Is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel illustrates the path your potential customers or leads take. In one way or another, it plays out for every type of business, including retail, sales, eCommerce, professional services, and more.

Any marketing channel can be a part of your sales funnel, and some span several channels. And once you learn to optimize your company’s sales funnel, you can influence how visitors to your website move through it.

Depending on who you talk to, there are three to seven stages of a sales funnel, but a traditional model following three phases:

• Top of the funnel (awareness). Before working prospects through your tunnel, you’ve got to get them to it. Building brand awareness is about showing people who you are and what you offer. Digital and traditional advertising, networking, and search engine optimization (SEO) are all sales funnel strategies businesses use to attract people.
• Middle of the funnel (interest). If the funnel’s top is like a first date and the bottom is a long-term commitment, the middle is where a relationship is built. Often referred to as the “consideration phase,” the middle section of your sales funnel includes four parts: the lead, the marketing-qualified lead, the sales qualified lead, and the opportunity. It’s about educating leads on what you offer and hinting it’s the answer to their problem.
• Bottom of the funnel (conversion). You’ve demonstrated value, and the relationship is on solid ground. The lead is ready to decide and, hopefully, become a customer. Highly successful salespeople close in-person sales deals by asking for the sale. But what if your buyer’s journey’s taking place online? Whether it’s an instruction that sparks interest, taps into desires, or grabs attention, the answer is a strong call-to-action or CTA that makes sure a potential customer understands there’s just one thing they should do right now.

How to Manage Your Brand’s Sales Funnel

Growing your business depends on customers and the relationships you build with them, and these relationships rely on maintaining consistent communications and connections. But what do you do when the number of deals you’re working on makes it challenging to keep up?

CRM software helps you:

• Keep track of lead activities as they move closer to becoming buyers.
• Organize your sales and marketing schedule.
• Automate certain sales activities and keep sales reps informed of customer needs and behaviors.
• Close deals faster.
• Forecast sales.

Here’s how a CRM can help land more sales at each stage of the sales funnel.

1. Awareness. Do you use multiple social media platforms to build customer relationships? CRM social media integrations can help you track these interactions. A CRM can also organize and segment prospects to make them easy to review and contact.
2. Interest. You can use a CRM to rank leads according to the likelihood of conversion and potential long-term value. You can also monitor lead interactions to identify other useful information, such as a company’s key decision-makers or a customer’s budget.
3. Conversion. Reporting helps you track deal progress in the funnel, evaluate the effectiveness of your sales funnel, and determine where deals are getting stuck. Once a deal closes, you can use data to uncover results like average sales and conversion rates of leads.

Deliver The Right Message at The Right Moment

A sales funnel aligns your marketing and sales processes so leads get the information they need when they need it. Did the shop where you saw that stylish t-shirt have window signs promoting a sale? Did a store rep offer their help to find the right size and color? These are just a couple of the ways brands use marketing tactics to close a sale.

CRM software helps your brand automate countless tasks at each stage of the sales funnel. Are you ready to learn how the right CRM can support your sales and marketing efforts to help your business grow? OnCourse is a custom-designed CRM that caters to your business’s specific sales and customer relationship needs. To learn more about how it can keep you on the right course for hitting your goals, get in touch with us today.

Many SMB owners question if sales software really offers them many benefits. The truth is every growth-minded business can benefit from automating its business processes and workflows. If you’re looking to boost sales and leverage the power of digital technologies, a complete sales management solution can help you:

• Personalize content.
• Interact with customers from order to delivery.
• Identify trends that impact your operations.

With tools like built-in calling, game-changing SMS, email sequences, and a user-friendly CRM, you can accelerate sales while boosting both lead quality and quantity.

What is Sales Software and Why Do You Need It?

Technology is transforming the expectations of salespeople and their customers. Yet, nearly half of sales leaders say their CRMs are failing their sales teams, customers, and prospects. Over half say their CRM’s administrative tasks cause significant friction for their salespeople.

Does this mean you should stick with your familiar spreadsheet solution? In our view, the answer is “no,” and here’s why.

Managing sales activity from shared spreadsheets is a sure path to frustration. While they may be great for data sorting, spreadsheets don’t help you make sales like sales software and a CRM do. Think about it, do spreadsheets let you:

• View chronological timelines of every prospect or customer interaction?
• Create a standardized sales process?
• See the status of your sales pipeline?
• Easily communicate and collaborate?

Spreadsheets also don’t integrate with other business tools like email platforms or customer support software. Sales software with integrated CRM capabilities makes it easier for your sales team to building better relationships while gaining control over data, fine-tuning sales and marketing communications, and accessing valuable sales performance analytics.

How to Choose the Right Sales Software for Your Business

Automating your business’s sales process saves time and lets your sales team focus on sales-critical activities that generate revenue. Today, sales software is less a luxury and more a necessity for any size business. However, the best sales software for a Fortune 500 company likely isn’t the best choice for a smaller business.

Here’s what to look for when deciding which platform is right for your business.

1. Who is your audience? Are you a B2B or B2C operation? Each type requires different features and capabilities. Knowing which ones you need to target your audience effectively helps pinpoint the right platform.
2. Specify the right features. In a world of must-haves, nice-to-haves, and never-needs, it’s essential to make sure you get the “must-haves” right. You want a platform that gives you the functionality you need to grow without all the bloat you’ll never use.
3. Email sequences drip campaigns. Studies show triggered sales emails have a greater than 70% higher open rate and more than 150% higher click-through rate than unscheduled emails. Look for a platform that lets you create powerful sequences that enhance your sales team’s abilities.
4. Mobile ready. Immediate mobile access to sales data gives your team a tactical advantage when closing.
5. Predictable pipeline. Automated reporting gives you quick insight into what’s working and what isn’t.

OnCourse: The Sales Automation Platform to Grow On

Ready to take advantage of all the ways sales software can increase sales velocity and help your business grow? OnCourse is a custom CRM designed to meet your specific sales automation and customer relationship needs. To learn more about how easy it can be to integrate sales software into your existing business framework, request a sales demo today.

CRM tools do everything from supporting collaboration to providing predictive insights to optimize sales. A good CRM system helps you integrate marketing, customer service, and sales efforts across multiple channels while opening up tremendous opportunities for businesses to thrive.

CRM Tools

What people want from a CRM hasn’t changed all that much over the last 20 years, but today’s CRMs are richer in features that make supporting customers and predicting sales volumes much easier than even five years ago. Here’s a look at the top 9 CRM tools that help businesses achieve consistent results.

1. Contact Management

Sometimes referred to as customer management, contact management allows you to segment and organize your contacts to better cater to them. You can also track customer interactions with your company and use collected data to improve sales and deliver exceptional customer service.

2. Lead Management

Leads are the lifeblood of your business, so it’s no surprise generating leads is the sales cycle’s first step. CRM software keeps all your leads in a centralized database and keeps your pipeline filled with new prospects.

3. Sales Analytics

One of a CRM’s most valuable features is the ability to gather data from multiple sources like social media, website traffic, and polls on past sales campaigns and then analyze it to create better future ones.

4. Email

Email and SMS are the top channels for communication. Email management in a CRM lets you:

• Send mass and follow-up emails
• Track email conversations
• Plan drip mail campaigns
• Send automated follow-up emails as well as birthday and anniversary greetings

An SMS feature lets you send personalized messages either in the moment or later in a sequence.

5. Pipeline Management

A sales pipeline helps you visualize the sales cycle and see where a particular deal is in the sales process. With CRM tools, you can then filter and sort deals to make it easier to perform bulk actions like sending emails to targeted customers.

6. Sequencing

Sequences are time-saving, automated sales follow-ups that use emails, texts, activities, and more to grow revenue and manage your workflows more efficiently.

7. Document Management

Life is easier and work is more enjoyable when everyone has access to the same information. Document management lets you collect, upload, store, and share documents in a centralized location. It keeps sales team members in the know and facilitates a consistent customer experience.

8. Workflow Automation

Boring, repetitive tasks are one of the main drivers of employee disengagement. Automating tedious actions frees up team members to complete more profitable tasks.

9. Mobile

Salespeople have busy schedules. They’re always on the move and don’t always have access to Wi-Fi. A mobile app makes it easier for sales team members to:

• Track sales activities.
• Access sales data on the spot.
• Sell anytime, anywhere, on any device.
• Close deals more quickly.

Consistent Sales Results with CRM Tools

The CRM market is expected to be worth $96.5 billion by 2028. The software’s rapid growth is clear evidence a CRM is one of the most effective tools you can invest in to acquire and retain customers. It helps you streamline and automate processes, make smarter offers, increase sales, and more. There’s simply no better way to meet your customer’s needs while growing your bottom line.

OnCourse is a custom CRM designed to support your sales, marketing, and customer service functions. Easy to integrate into your existing business framework, it’s a budget-friendly solution for improving seller performance and taking customer service to the next level.

Want to know more? Head here to get a deeper look at all of OnCourse’s impressive features.

Life as a freelancer has some incredible upsides. Creative and personal freedom, the ability to set your own work terms, and choosing the clients you want to work with are just a few. At the end of the day, though, you’re still managing a freelance business, and that requires a lot of skills that fall way outside your core specialties.

Aside from filling client requests, you’re also a marketer, project manager, and customer service rep. And as your business grows, you end up struggling with more non-core tasks every day. Before long, you can find yourself unorganized, missing deadlines, or forgetting to follow up with a potential high-paying client.

A good CRM (customer relationship management) centralizes the business side of freelancing, helping you tame the chaos and market your services in a more profitable way.

Who Can Benefit From CRM?

No matter what your profession may be, if you:

• Frequently forget to follow up with prospective clients
• Can’t remember who you’ve already pitched an idea to
• Spend hours on tasks instead of projects

You can benefit from CRM.

The Benefits of CRM for Freelancers

As a freelancer, your skills pay the rent but your business is people. CRM for freelancers helps manage activities that are essential to your success, including contact management, lead nurturing, client interactions, data automation, and client pipeline management.

Benefits essential to organization and growth include:

1. Simplified billing.
2. Easier collaboration with clients and other freelancers.
3. Support for automated email campaigns.
4. Detailed insights to better formulate your unique goals.
5. The ability to view clients and contacts in a single dashboard and then organize them in a way that makes sense for your business.

Whether you’re just starting your freelance career or are a long-time free agent, a CRM can significantly improve the way you operate and the way you communicate with clients and customers.

What Your CRM Should Deliver

Like many digital solutions, not all CRMs are created equal. A good CRM is an integrated suite of tools that supports your social media efforts, HR system, client onboarding, and cloud storage. It should also assist you in creating business development goals and marketing campaigns.  From a practical standpoint, it should be simple to use and generate easy-to-understand reports that help streamline your workflow and identify new opportunities.

If your CRM only performed one or two of these tasks, it would be a valuable solution for your freelance business. That it does all these things and more makes CRM an even more vital requisite for success. You develop a better understanding of your audience and, in turn, your business. In short, investing in CRM software can be one of the smartest things you do to advance your freelance career.

OnCourse CRM

OnCourse CRM provides an integrated site of tools designed to help manage all your freelance business relationships, including new and existing clients. It offers powerful task management, built-in calling, multi-layer reporting, a meeting scheduler, and more to increase sales velocity and drive productivity. For more information on how OnCourse can help your business get better organized and achieve greater growth, request a sales demo today.

By now, you’ve probably heard a good CRM system is vital to successful marketing campaigns, sales cycles, and brand identity. For businesses that have happily used spreadsheets to fulfill most of their customer relationship management needs, it’s fair to ask, “Why do I need a CRM when our current system does the job?” That depends an awful lot on what is meant by “doing the job.”

Whether you’re looking to grow your saturated customer base or need a fresh approach to improving the customer experience, cost-effective CRM software can help.

How a CRM Keeps Customers Coming Back

It’s easy to see why CRM software is currently the fastest-growing enterprise application software category. If you want to make the most of your sales pipeline, CRM software offers the simplest way to monitor customer interactions and deal progress and analyze sales performance. Other benefits include the ability to:

• Segment customers. Sales teams can build a strong pipeline of prospects, leads, and contacts, but it’s understanding and personalizing marketing to those potential customers that converts them. When you eliminate customer data silos and store customer information in a centralized database, you improve your chances of selling to these customers again and again.
• Scale the sales process. If you want to grow, you need to set up the right processes for your sales team. When they have one place to track leads, prospects, and customers, they can use the data to identify patterns, determine which approaches are working, and which methods are falling short.
• Achieve sales goals far above those who don’t use a CRM. For instance, a CRM helps you carry out more efficient email outreach by tracking a customer’s history with your brand. It also helps boosts sales by analyzing and even anticipating customer needs and problems so you can contact them at the precise time they need your product or service most.

Most of all, a CRM helps improve customer satisfaction by documenting all touchpoints with potential and existing customers. Your sales and support teams have easy access to the “whole picture,” enabling them to provide more flexible, responsive, and personalized service. Ideally, this translates into more enjoyable customer experiences, better reviews, and increased customer retention.

CRM as Part of Your Overall Business Strategy

No matter what size your business, the fundamentals of adopting a CRM are the same. An in-depth analysis of your industry, competitors, customer segments, and economic environment should all be used in formulating your sales strategy. What happens next might surprise you, as companies often discover their self-perception differs significantly from how potential and existing customers perceive them.

Successful business growth isn’t only about getting and keeping customers. It’s also about knowing what works and, perhaps more crucially, what doesn’t. While a CRM can’t make sales reps sell more or reduce customer churn if your product or services are fundamentally flawed, it can help you see where internal changes might reposition your brand and drive sales growth.

If you need one more reason to invest in CRM software, here it is: Your competition is likely already using it. Implementing your own CRM keeps you competitive and responsive to change while providing higher levels of personalized customer care.

OnCourse CRM

Sold on the idea of how valuable a CRM solution can be for your business but have no idea where or how to get started? OnCourse is a custom CRM designed to meet your unique customer relationship needs. Budget-friendly and easy to integrate into your existing business framework, it’s the ideal solution for increasing sales and maximizing revenue.

To learn more about what OnCourse can help you achieve, request a sales demo today.