Online CRM Part 4 - Managing your sales opportunities with Workbooks Online

Are you finding it difficult to manage your sales process using Microsoft Outlook, Word or Excel? It’s not that you can’t use these standard tools to organise your sales process, there are just better tools available. If your time is precious to you, then you can work more productively and make life easier for yourself by installing a proper Customer Relationship Management (CRM ) system such as Workbooks Online.

CRM Essentials

For me, there are a number of essential activities that I need to be made as simple as possible:

Company / Contact Search

Any CRM system that doesn’t allow you to find the company or person quickly wouldn’t even make it off the starting blocks. Workbooks provides a search box that allows you to perform a “Google-like” search for whatever it is you are looking for. You are presented with a list of matching search results and you simply click on the right one to go to the record you need.

Recording Notes and Activities
Excel Spreadsheets and Outlook fall short for contact management because they don’t provide a simple-to-use way of recording telephone call and meeting notes. Knowledge is power and your staff will be better informed and provide a better service to your clients and customers if they have access to meeting and conversation notes when talking to your customers. Workbooks allows you to record details of every interaction that your employees have with your clients / customers and make them available to everybody.

Activity Scheduling
A CRM needs to help you to plan your time by allowing you to schedule tasks telephone calls and meetings with your existing and prospective customers and provide you with reminders for these activities. With Workbooks, you can schedule events together with notes to remind you of the purpose of the call / meeting etc. You will be presented with a schedule of reminders of your pending tasks when you log into Workbooks.

Quoting
Whilst you can use Excel / Word Templates to generate quotes, by storing your product / service book within the system, Workbooks simplifies the process of drawing up quotations by eliminating the need to search for product information in separate databases / spreadsheets and pre-populating the quote with the right contact information.

Pipeline Management
Pipeline Management is a critical activity for any business, but without an effective CRM tool, they can take a long time to produce manually. Workbooks automatically provides sales people, managers and business owners with complete visibility of all business opportunities as well as where they are in the deal process.

The video below provides you with a quick overview of how you can use Workbooks CRM to manage your customer / client data:

If your current customer management tools no longer meet your needs, then let us know. We would love to be able to help you to implement the right tools to help you grow your business.

Online CRM Part 2 - Turning Leads Into Profits More Efficiently

Sales people are hungry for success, not paperwork! They want to turn sales enquiries into orders with the minimum of effort. By automating your business processes using Workbooks.com’s online Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, you can maximise the amount of time that your sales staff have to devote to serving your customers, helping them to work as efficiently as possible.

Before and After Workbooks.com!

Let me give you an example of how Workbooks Online CRM changed the way that Clearview Data Systems works. Before switching to Workbooks.com, we used Act! For Windows as a sales contact management system alongside a "home grown" order processing system. Customer support was a fairly manual affair which used Microsoft Exchange Public Folders to store customer emails and licence keys. There was no integration between any of these systems or with our web site, so web leads arrived via email and needed to be re-keyed into the system. As there was no integration with our order processing system, quotes were individually created as Excel spreadsheets by poring through our supplier price lists for current pricing and manually entering this information into the spreadsheet.

How Workbooks.com Has Made Us More Efficient

Today things work very differently. Web leads no longer need to be entered manually since they are captured directly into our Workbooks system from our web forms. There is no need to search for product pricing and descriptions since our product book is integrated into Workbooks for sales and order processing. We can also see details of all of our customer’s equipment that we are supporting as well as any contact that our engineers have had with our customers by way of support. In addition, Workbooks can automatically produce all of the sales pipeline reports that we need to monitor and predict revenue streams as well as plan expenditure and resourcing requirements.

You can see an overview of how you would manage your sales process using Workbooks.com in the video below:

Workbooks.com has cut out a huge amount of inefficiency in the way that our sales process works. Do you feel that your sales processes could be improved but don't know who to turn to for advice? If so, let me know what the issue is that you need to address and I would be happy to let you know if we can help.

Please come back next week when you will learn more about how Workbooks can help you to automate further areas of your company operations.