You’ve probably heard the statistic: “1 million US B2B salespeople will lose their jobs to self-service E-Commerce by the year 2020” according to a 2015 Forrester forecast. Yet, few people can claim they haven’t seen it coming.

In the 1993 classic “Groundhog Day”, Bill Murray is stuck living the same day over and over and over again. It’s no coincidence that the film’s screenwriter chose to include an encounter with Ned Ryerson, an annoying insurance agent, to make the repetitive day even more nightmarish.

Ned Ryerson is everything customers hate about salespeople: Irritating, too pushy, untrustworthy, and incapable of tailoring his pitch and product to each customer.

With E-commerce and the rise of the SaaS sales model, salespeople like Ned Ryerson are in an endangered spot. But before we discuss how to avoid becoming Ned (or how to stop being one), let’s talk about some of the reasons why every traditional salesperson should be worried.

Why Salespeople are on their way out

The same Forrester study found:

  • 75% of B2B buyers now say that buying from a website is more convenient than buying from a sales representative.
  • 93% say that they prefer buying online rather than from a salesperson when they’ve decided what to buy.

The modern customer is one search and a few clicks away from knowing everything they want to know about the product they need.

Traditionally, the salesperson took care of educating the customer. Ned Ryerson approaches you (a dormant lead) and pitches an insurance plan, explains why you need it, and badgers you until you buy it or give him your phone number.

The internet not only has made product information immediate and accessible but has also made buying the product online easier and cheaper while completely bypassing the salesperson.

It also doesn’t help that decades of overly repetitive cold calls and scripted sales interactions have damaged customers’ trust in salespeople beyond repair. In contrast, E-commerce presents a much more pleasant experience and a customer-centric platform.

SaaS Stress SOS: The SaaS Sales Model

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Your traditional B2B salesperson would probably find “Groundhog Day” the ideal scenario to land a deal. They get to pitch the same expensive deal (1 yearly software license for thousands of dollars for example) every day using the same sales script until the customer gives up. Then they make a big commission and move on to the next customer using the same strategy.

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SaaS has changed the delivery model of software to a Pay-As-You-Go or subscription-based service. Instead of focusing on securing long-term deals, the pressure for salespeople is now on meeting short-term quotas that are incredibly challenging to maintain. This is mostly because controlling SaaS Sales churn – the rate at which customers cease to use the service they subscribed to—is beyond the salesperson’s scope.

Unfortunately, many salespeople still can’t adjust to this new shift. Even more worrying are the companies that haven’t yet adjusted their overall sales strategy accordingly.

Besides product delivery and sales, SaaS has changed sales-quotas, pricing strategies, and salespeople’s responsibilities. Between finding leads, meeting quotas, lowering churn, and managing accounts, sales are starting to sound like the most stressful career – and justifiably so.

Aaron Ross author of the award-winning, bestselling SaaS bible “Predictable Revenue” calls overtasking sales teams “one of the biggest productivity killers” facing SaaS companies. When too many responsibilities are included in one sales role, he adds, salespeople suffer from a lack of focus, motivation, and appropriate training.

Furthermore, keeping track of relevant metrics is even harder when the salesperson covers so many roles.  More importantly, “lumped responsibilities obscure what’s happening and make it more difficult to isolate and fix issues with accountable follow through” continues Ross.

Companies that fail to implement sales specialization should look inwards when unable to make the revenue they aim for.

Old Sales Habits Die Hard (And Annoy Your Customers)

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Whether the Cold Call is dead or not merits a separate article, but what everyone can agree on is that repetitive cold calling is annoying for customers.

Ineffective cold calls, however, are symptoms of bigger issues. Notably, a disconnection with how customers view salespeople and an inability to replace ineffective strategies with better ones.

“74% of consumers prefer to receive commercial communications via Email” according to a Merkle study. In addition, The Direct Marketing Association reports that “Email marketing has an ROI of 4,300%”. What do the numbers mean?

Dressing up old sales habits as outbound prospecting when other strategies deliver a much higher ROI should be inexcusable for any salesperson.

Ned-Free Sales: How To Reinvent The Sales Role (When it Doubt, Divide Labor)

CORE SALES ROLES

Aaron Ross, of Predictable Revenue, suggests starting Sale Specialization with the second salesperson hire. Ideally, a core sales team should have the following 4 roles:

  • “Inbound Lead Qualification: Commonly called Market Response Reps, they qualify marketing leads coming inbound through the website or 800 numbers. The sources of these leads are marketing programs, search engine marketing, or organic word-of-mouth.
  • Outbound” Prospecting/Cold Calling 2.0: Commonly called Sales Development Reps or New Business Development Reps, this function prospects into lists of target accounts to develop new sales opportunities from cold or inactive accounts. This is a team dedicated to proactive business development. Highly efficient outbound reps and teams do NOT close deals, but create & qualify new sales opportunities and then pass them to Account Executives to close.
  • Account Executives: They are the quota-carrying reps who close deals. They can be either inside or out in the field. As a best practice, even when a company has an Account Management/Customer Success function, Account Executives should stay in touch with new customers they close past the close until the new customer is deployed and launched.
  • Account Management/Customer Success: Client deployment and success, ongoing client management, and renewals. Someone needs to be dedicated to making customers successful–and that is NOT the salesperson! “

You can read more on “Predictable Revenue” on Aaron Ross’s website.

Sales Automation is the Answer

Does your sales team still not use a CRM? Well, it’s never too late.

A CRM can help you implement more effective cold calling strategies that do not alienate customers. By tracking the history of your sales contacts and response rates, you can tweak outbound prospecting strategies (like messaging schedule) without contacting the same customer multiple times in a short –albeit irritating– window.

Being a customer-centric app, CRMs also help to establish better customer relationships (more profitable even) which leads to more effective targeted prospecting and more data for your sales forecasts and analytics.

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How Teamgate Can Help

Teamgate can help you become a more likable salesperson than Ned Ryerson. How?

By offering an intuitive CRM fully dedicated to customer relationships and the sales pipeline, we make sure that any workflow implementing Teamgate will keep customers at its core.

Likewise, Teamgate’s Segmentation features (we will discuss Segmentation on our next blog ) help salespeople avoid the problem of Information Overload by categorizing customers into appropriate sub-groups. We realize that not all your leads and customers are the same.

Furthermore, Teamgate’s contacts management helps you centralize all your sales contacts in one platform. You can organize, review and schedule contacts with your leads and customers. You can integrate it with third-party applications like Google, LinkedIn, Mac Contacts, and Outlook or craft your own Zapier+Teamgate integration recipes.

Assigning separate teams and salespeople to deals is yet another intuitive task in Teamgate. Additionally, you get to measure the performance of each sales role and identify which areas in particular need improvement.

Check out more of the analytical and forecasting tools available via Teamgate.

Are you tired of being a B2B Ned Ryerson? Start your Free Teamgate Trial Today!

4 Traits of a Trustworthy Customer Relationship Management Platform. Why Should you trust your CRM?

Most business plans involve a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) section, devoted to organizing customer data in a way that maximizes profits and helps maintain satisfactory relationships between your company and your prospects and customers. Implementation of the plan often requires utilizing technology to help you meet your goals. In most industries, it is necessary to keep your information in a platform designed specifically for CRM. The data you share here is sensitive, and you need to be very cautious with it. Here are some ways to know whether or not your CRM is trustworthy.

Sharing Your Customer Data Over a Secure System

A trustworthy CRM app is secure. You should be 100% certain that your customers’ information is safe. Always go with a platform that is well-known. If you’re unsure, read online reviews about the platform you’re prospecting. If you still feel uneasy about the privacy of your data, do not proceed.

One trick is that, depending which browser you are using, you can determine the security of the site by looking at the address bar at the top of the page. If you see a green lock at the left of the screen, that is an indicator that the site is encrypted. Before you share any sensitive information online, you can easily make sure that you are sending via an encrypted site.

If you’re on a browser that doesn’t show whether or not the site is encrypted, you won’t see the green lock. You will have to find out, using other means, whether or not your information is safe. This is very important, as you don’t want your customer data shared with the wrong people. That could be a disaster for you and them.

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User-Friendly Platform for Information Management

The purpose of CRM platforms is to ensure that your customer relationships are managed with ease. They are here to help you, not make your job harder. Ask for a demo or take advantage of any free trials offered before you buy in. If you’re already working inside an app, but it seems difficult to navigate, try out some others to find one that’s right for you. Your CRM should be a step up from writing notes on a whiteboard, not a step-down.

Professional Customer Support

When you have issues with your CRM, their support team should be ready to help you in a timely manner. Whether your problem pertains to the usability of the platform or mistakes on either end, you should be provided with solutions. Your CRM provider should have a solid understanding of customer relationships themselves. This will be reflected in the way they treat you. If your problems aren’t getting solved, or it’s taking weeks for the service team to respond to you, it may be time to consider switching to a new platform.

When working with a CRM provider, you should not only find satisfaction in the relationships you have with their team but should also be able to learn from them. Who better to study business relationships strategies from than the pros. The major developers behind leading customer relationship management software are experts in the field. Use your satisfactory dealings with them as inspiration for tactics you can add to your plan and become or maintain your stature as an authority in your own field.

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Actually Nurture Customer Relationships

Your CRM platform should be like the assistant that keeps you on track with your customers. Think of it as a real person that you work with all day. Is the platform actually helping you nurture relationships with your customers? You can measure this with retention and sales. If your relationships are being nurtured, helping you reach your goals, you can rest assured that you are getting exactly what you pay for.

Successful customer relationship nurturing comes from platforms that provide detailed data storage in a way that adds value (conversions) to your sales funnel. You should be able to take a look at the information stored in your CRM and analyze what’s going on a way that provides insight. What’s working in your sales funnel? What’s not working? You should be able to answer those two questions with confidence when the day is over. If you’re working with a trustworthy CRM, you will be able to.

The results of working with a reliable team of customer relationship specialists will be seen in your sales. Consider safety, user experience, customer support, and whether or not you are able to track relationships effectively when choosing your platform. If you are not already completely satisfied with the software you’re using, now might be the perfect time to try your options.

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The CRM market is saturated with a variety of apps and suits promising to satisfy every business’s needs. However, the ensuing fierce competition between apps to offer more expansive solutions has obscured the line between CRMs and ERPS.

Although All-In-One solutions might, at first, seem like they would be the ideal choice, specialized CRMs or custom-built CRM ecosystems can provide an incredible competitive advantage for small and big businesses alike.

Focus on Relationships

It makes sense for a company to inquire on whether a particular CRM also automates processes like accounting, billing and inventory management.  It is important however to remember the feature key to any CRM’s success: the R.

Core to any CRM is the ability to manage relationships with leads of all kind. Consequently, a CRM app dedicated to the sales pipeline is bound to be better at valuing good customer relationships.

This also means that the dedicated CRM is more likely than All-in-One suits to research and develop features unique to the customer relationship aspect. A classic development mistake for apps is spreading out resources across multiple features incompatible with CRM’s principal purpose: Leads conversion and customer relationships.

Flexibility

A good CRM should seamlessly slot in with already existing workflows.  This is why All-in-One CRMs target the same standardized workflows that big enterprises adopt. Small and medium sized businesses, on the other hand, rely on flexible workflows which makes the rigidity of All-In-One CRM solutions an obstacle.

Moreover, the wide variety of apps available for businesses allows you to build your own ecosystem centered on the dedicated CRM app of your choice. You can tailor this ecosystem to mimic your current business workflows and keep adjusting it according to future needs.

Instead of the ready-made features that All-in-One suits offer like billing, accounting and project management, you get to decide which particular app solution matches your resources and fits best with your workflow.

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Apps like Zapier allow a number of CRMs to easily integrate with other apps and services without any technical knowledge of their APIs. Flexibility in terms of integration can be an incredibly cost-effective and efficient feature due to the fact that it creates a CRM ecosystems consisting of apps your employees are already familiar with.

Related: Did Santa Leave a CRM app?

Scalability

When keeping the scalability of your business in mind, it’s important to make sure that business processes will stay centered around the customer.  Since growth is driven by increasing customers and customer demand, it makes perfect sense to have a platform dedicated to ensuring smooth scalability.

With increasing customers comes the need for better leads management, sales forecasting tools and other analytics native to your CRM platform of choice. Although most all-in-one solutions also offer such tools, it can hard to dedicate sufficient attention to them when they’re also cluttered with non-CRM related features.

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Price

The “all” in All-in-One CRM solutions comes with a hefty price. For CRM suits, subscription fees take into account all the features and services made available at the business’s disposal regardless of whether they are needed or not. If you are only in the market for a CRM solution only, investing on features you do not required yet is a waste of resources. As previously mentioned, dedicated CRMs are flexible enough to accommodate more functionalities when the need for them arises.

Focus

Low adoption rates are a constant concern for any business seeking to make a CRM app part of its workflows. In simpler terms, businesses need to make sure that whatever CRM app they choose will become an elemental part of their sales team routines. Often, purchased CRMs app go either under-used or have some of their features ignored.

Low adoption is a much bigger risk with All-in-One solutions when their features fall outside sale’s scope. In addition, these solutions also require more extensive and frequent training for the staff members using them, otherwise, unfamiliarity with the features often results in under-use.

On the other hand, dedicated CRMs make low adoption less of a concern thanks to the ease with which they fit in most businesses workflows intuitively. Moreover, training your staff to use them is easier and cheaper.

The ease of integration, previously discussed, of dedicated CRMs with other solutions that staff members are familiar with guarantees no interruptions in your business workflows to deal with the logistics of adopting a CRM app.

At Teamgate, we remain committed to offering a CRM app dedicated to the sales pipeline and to customer relationships. Features such as Sales Funnel and Sales Forecasting reflect our commitment to our app’s purpose: Customer relationship.

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Related: Old vs. New CRM

You may be launching a new business soon. Perhaps you already have a thriving or struggling company. Either way, you’re curious about starting to look at tools that will help you manage customer relationships. When, in the lifespan of your business, is it best to try out CRM planning and implementation?

First, let’s take a look at what CRM entails. At some point, all businesses should have a strategy in place to guide how they will connect with customers, both existing and those that will surface in the future. This is their CRM plan. During the planning phase, a company looks at who their target market is, what the typical behaviors are, and what tools they should be using to best appeal to their market. As with all business-related strategies, these need to stay open for scheduled evaluations and be altered as needed. A great piece of advice is to make sure that the entire organization is briefed when a new or modified plan is executed.

So, when is the right time to start planning your Customer Relationship Management? No matter what point you are at in your business, the answer to the posed question is, “now.” Even if you haven’t launched your products or services to the public, having a great CRM plan involving the five key cross-functional processes is vital. If you’re already in business, CRM is only going to benefit your sales. Here’s what you need to consider today.

Strategy Development Techniques

What means are you going to use to create your strategy? This is just as important, in CRM, as the plan itself. You should have an idea what kind of information you will need. What target demographics are important to your strategy? Where are you going to compile your information from? How are you going to organize this information? Who is delegated to which tasks? When is the deadline for completion? Ask yourself these questions, and make the appropriate connections before you dive into the planning. A department meeting is a good way to brainstorm and make sure you are going to have all bases covered.

Once you have a good outline of the strategy, you and your team can start researching. You will want to compile as much information as you can about your prospective or current clients/ customers, depending on the maturity of your business. The goal is to see their spending habits and any needs or problems they have that you might solve.

When considering CRM implementation, it’s important to tailor your customer service tools to your industry’s specific needs. For example, businesses in the home services sector, such as plumbing companies, can greatly benefit from a dedicated plumbing answering service. This specialized service ensures that all customer calls are handled efficiently, boosting customer satisfaction and allowing plumbers to focus on the job at hand without disruptions.

Related: All-in-One CRM v.s. Dedicated CRMs

Value Creation Methods

Now that you have all of the important details in front of you, it’s time to take a look at providing value to your consumers. First of all, you must stand out from the crowd. You must also solve the problems and fill the needs of your target market. What are their issues and how can your customer service efficiently help them?

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For example, out of a sample of 100 people, 60 of them said that not being able to call a company after 5:00 pm, EST was hindering their likelihood of ordering products like yours. Currently, you have no after-hours call center. You can provide value by opening the telephone lines for extended hours and/ or directing after-hours calls to an answering service asking callers to visit a website where they can potentially see a list of frequently asked questions or start a live chat with an agent. By coming up with a viable solution to a real problem, you create value. Your CRM strategy is going to basically be a series of value creation tactics with your clients and customers in mind.

The Importance of Multichannel Integration

Integrating multiple channels of customer relationship tools, such as Crisp or Helpscout, into your plan is key. Email marketing, customer service, lead funneling, and all other CRM functions are each a working part of a larger whole. If your strategy involves simply having a shoddy contact form on your website to which you respond to inquiries within a couple of days, chances are you plan needs more work. Decide which tools you will be using and how you can digitally integrate these tools with one another  for the best user experience. Automate what you can, and let your tools work for you and your customers.

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Information Management Considerations

This is where you will want to start tracking the effectiveness of your CRM plan. There should be a section in the strategy itself outlining a timeline and what you will be tracking. Do you need to know who is opening your emails, how much revenue you’re bringing in, the performance of your salespeople? These are some of the things you will need to consider in the information management portion of your strategy.

Performance Assessment

If you look at Amazon.com, you will see that the website is booming as one of the largest online retailers on the planet. They got this way by maintaining the highest standards for customers. They continuously recycle energy into CRM planning and implementation with the customer in mind. The final portion of your planning will go into assessing the performance of your current plan, and making changes. Again, you will want to brief your entire organization when changes are made to any of your company’s strategies. This is no exception.

It is essential to always leave room for improvement in your relationships with customers. When you make mistakes, quickly find a solution and move forward. The important part is that you start nurturing the relationships you have with your customers, starting today. As you experience growth within your organization, you can be grateful for giving appropriate attention to the CRM portion of your company structure.

Related: Old vs. New CRM