Sales Team Management Software
Learn how sales team management software helps businesses to improve sales team performance and drive company revenue by removing the manual administration tasks that impact on employee time and increasing the visibility of critical information. The following article walks you through the typical features included within sales software tools and provides you with twenty tips to increase sales performance by streamlining essential day-to-day activities through sales process automation.
What is Sales Team Management Software?
Sales team management software provides sales professionals with a complete overview into essential sales information across an organisation. Sales management software is often referred to as a CRM system and is readily used by sales and marketing teams to quickly and easily manage contacts and customers, track sales and quotes and remove repetitive administration tasks from sales team workloads.
Popular requirements within sales team management tools include lead and opportunity management, sales forecasting and KPI reporting. As a sales process flow becomes more complex, additional features such as workflow for discount approval, sales quote approval and proposal workflow can help to streamline the sales process. Having a streamlined and automated sales process will enable sales teams to concentrate on value added tasks within the sales cycle, such as account management, and will remove the pains of repetitive, error-prone administration.
Common features included within sales team management software include:
- Accounts and Contact Management: Contact details, address, agreed customer discount percentage, accounting and finance details, leads and campaigns
- Activities and History Management: History of customer interactions, calendar view, create follow-up events and tasks, reminders.
- Opportunities: Enquiry, contact information, total potential / probability of sale, lead source
- Quotations: Create sales quotes, manage price lists, product lines, discount levels
- Sales Orders: Create sales orders, order numbers, job numbers etc.
- Job Management: Monitor and search the each sales order
- Pricing: Manage pricing, customer discount levels etc.
- Reporting: Create reports e.g. conversion rates, repeat business per month, unconverted quotes etc.
- Email and PDF Generation: Automatically generate PDFs for sending or printing, send HTML email
- Integration: Easily integrated with other business systems to automate additional sales processes and marketing activities
Sales Team Management Software Example: Firefly Suite
20 Tips to Increase Sales Performance Through Sales Process Automation
Sales management tools remove repetitive administration tasks, such as placing sales leads from your company website into your CRM system, automating daily, weekly or monthly sales reports or automatically notifying sales team members if their customer has been placed on credit hold in your accounting system. The most common sales process automation scenarios that our customers implement to increase sales team productivity include:
- Sales approval workflow to automate the process of having sales quotes and proposal workflow authorised by managers
- Discount approval workflow to automate discount authorisation
- Automated email follow up of sales opportunities that have not been chased for ‘x’ period
- Automatic sales forecast reports generated and distributed
- Automated updating of price lists through integration with systems of key suppliers
- Implementing a customer and sales portal for customers to manage their own accounts and place an order online
- Allowing customers and sales teams to check stock levels of a product simply by sending a text message or email
- Cash received reports sent directly to sales people
- New enquiries highlighted to sales people quickly through workflow and email automation
- Sales league tables distributed automatically
- Weekly / monthly activity reports generated and distributed automatically
- Automatically chase sales people who have not submitted activity reports or other documents
- Notify sales people when their activity levels fall below pre-set thresholds with an automated email
- Dynamically monitor quotes / proposals prepared with unusually low margin levels
- Automatically create and send alerts via email or SMS to sales people when one of their customers gets put on credit hold
- Automatically distribute summaries of recent orders placed by their customers sent to sales teams
- Automate a notification to sales people when an order is received or goods dispatched when in relation to key customers
- Automate an email notification to a sales person when another person, for example, a member of the customer service team speaks to one of their customers
- Automatically notify sales people when their customers place technical support calls or these are escalated
- Automate price changes to the sales team
For more information on how sales process automation can help you to streamline essential sales processes, download the brochure below.
Discover Sales Process Automation
Sales Process Automation Example using BPA Platform
Benefits of Sales Team Management Software
An online sales management application, such as Firefly Suite, is an essential sales management tool that you, your sales team and customers can rely on. Regardless of your industry specialism or the services you offer, sales process management software provides you with increased visibility of critical sales and customer information. A detailed overview of valuable information, such as sales and key performance indicators (KPI), helps with long term planning and sales forecasting. Here are eight benefits that web-based sales management software can provide:
- An increased visibility of critical information e.g. sales figures, quotes, pipeline etc.
- Improved customer relationship management
- Enhanced internal and external communication
- Increase sales team productivity and company performance
- Eradication of repetitive, bi-directional data entry and administration tasks
- Improved sales forecasting
- Streamlined sales process workflow
- Improved decision making
Try Firefly Suite Firefly Suite Brochure
For more information on how to plan and deploy sales team management software and to automate essential sales processes, try Firefly Suite for free, download the brochure below or call us on +44 (0)330 99 88 700.