Let's talk more about sales process and integration with CRM. Lots of companies fail to see the connection between developing a well defined sales process that's repeatable and scalable and the actual recording of sales activity, tracking and forecasting of sales results in a customer relationship, management or CRM system, also known as sales force automation or SFA. In today's day and age, a company cannot afford to deploy a CRM system without first spending the necessary time in order to define their sales process. Likewise, other companies that have well defined sales processes, to the extent that they don't do a good job of customizing their CRM systems--to integrate with that sales process-- they'll find many disconnects leading to frustration, poor data management, poor forecasting, poor reporting and poor pipeline visibility when it comes to sales management tools. So, now more than ever, it's really important to integrate both your sales process with your CRM system to get the optimized results that you're looking for. The first step in this process is to start by defining your sales process. You can't deploy CRM without first defining your sales process. And it's really easy to do so. We've developed a set of tools that allow your company to actually go through the steps of defining all of the work flow and different field sales and inside sales definitions as well as opportunity stages so that they can be easily mapped into sales force automation or CRM. Once you've completed the complete sales process definition which typically defines the work flow, the different sales opportunity stages, as well as the different actions and sales tools to be used at each stage. It's very easy to integrate those into your CRM system and deploy them and then use the CRM system as an actual tool to manage the workflow and improve your sales efficiency. That is the number one benefit that you're going to get out of a well defined sales process and sales process integration is you're going to get better efficiency from your sales force, you're going to get better opportunity management, your also going to get better visibility over your overall pipeline and your overall sales forecast leading to better predictable revenues and better forecasting accuracy. These are just some of the benefits of integrating your sales process with CRM. |
