It’s a dirty little secret in business that sales people that embrace their CRM are far and few between. In fact, I will go one step further; most sales people hate their CRM. Why? It is tedious. It slows them down. They are compensated by closing deals – which means creating as many opportunities as possible and then chasing, consulting, schmoozing until the sun rises.

In fact, sometimes the only time they are focused on their CRM is the night before the weekly sales team call, when they batch update all of their opportunities so that they don’t catch heat the next day on the call for looking like a slacker.

Why can’t sales managers get their team to use CRM?

Of course the story is much different for management. Sales managers love their CRM. With it they can monitor every action of their team, analyze their performance, and see who has been making their calls, synopses of calls, who is their top performer and who needs to have “the chat.” Only guess what? There is often not a lot of data to report. Sure, opportunities get added, and closed deals get updated with lightning speed. But what steps were taken and when, who said what and when, and why is Kevin unable to close as much business as Kellie, or vice versa, remains a mystery – and so sales managers become masters at creating stories that they can feed on up the food chain. They don’t feel great about having to make up so much for the executive team but the reverse looks even worse for them. No one wants to explain why they can’t get their team to use their CRM – the very one that they personally lobbied so heavily to purchase in the first place. They are tired of starting off every sales meeting with a lecture about keeping their CRM records up to date. Why are sales people so lazy when it comes to CRM?

What went wrong with your CRM?

Before the invention of CRM people used rolodexes, index cards, paper and pen to keep track of contacts, sales opportunities and closed deals. It was unproductive as heck and when a sales person jumped ship, they took the knowledge stored in their address books and heads with them. CRM came along like the new sheriff in town. Promising order, compliance and a permanent record of customer information. It seemed too good to be true: organization, order and data.

The only problem we have all learned is that sales is both an art and a science. Data is important. We learn that it takes X number of calls to create X number of opportunities that result in X number of closed deals. That’s the science. But we also know that it is not just numbers. Certain sales people out-perform other sales people. They both may make exactly the same number of calls each day, send the same number of emails, work the same number of hours, but one is able to sell more, sell faster.

There is a new sheriff in town

CRM was a tremendous improvement on index cards but now we have a newer sheriff in town. Unlike the old sheriff, the new sheriff is really smart and sexy, and most importantly loved by both sales people and sales management alike. The old sheriff is still sticking around. In fact the two are sharing the job – and it’s a godsend for businesses. They old sheriff provides order; the new sheriff makes everyone’s lives easier, more efficient, more insightful. The new sheriff is even savvier than the old and integrates well with almost all the systems that the old sheriff established, systems like SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Salesforce.  The new sheriff is a tool called Tenfold. It integrates your phone system with your CRM – and presto – you have CRM Redux. Tenfold’s functionality is the best thing that has ever happened to CRM, sales teams and sales managers. Read on.

Tenfold’s functionality will blow your mind

It’s hard to know where to start because Tenfold’s functionality is a true game-changer for organizations. It increases sales productivity, improves relationships with customers, provides rich analytics and insight into the sales process –and best of all is an intuitive platform that delivers ROI right out of the gate.

Automatic call logging. In or out of the office, calls are automatically logged into your CRM as they happen. Records of sales calls with date, time and length of call happen in real time. No stopping in-between calls for admin work. No lag in CRM updates if reps are on the road. All calls are logged all the time. What a concept.

Click to dial. It’s ironic that we all use speed dialing on our mobile devices for personal business but traditional dialing for selling. Stop that right now. Increase sales productivity “tenfold” by giving your sales team this basic functionality. Dialing takes time. Time is money. You do the math.

Voice analytics. Through phone system integration you can now record and analyze sales conversations. Whoa. We know that sales people who do more listening than talking are more successful but short of joining every sales call as a third-party how do you know who is doing more listening? More intriguing is Tenfold’s ability to “listen” for phrases or trigger words. Want to know why some of your team closes deals faster than others? Why customers are complaining about the “attitude” of someone on your team. Well, now you can find out through Tenfold’s powerful analytics.

360° View of Customer data.  With Tenfold installed and integrated with your CRM you now have instance access to complete customer information. When a customer calls in, a panel appears like magic on your desktop with aggregated current information about the customer. Your customers and prospects will feel delighted at the ease of communication. No rehashing of previous conversations, no guessing, just helpful productive conversations that lead to new business, more renewals and happier customers.

But wait there is more

Tenfold has so much functionality, the list of features seems endless.  If you missed our recent webinar on Tenfold, you can watch a recording here.