No matter how established a business is, achieving continued growth must always be front-of-mind. Managing customer relationships, sales cycles, and revenue through a CRM platform like Salesforce.com makes perfect sense – yet the importance of integrating your CRM with your business communications system isn’t always so obvious.
An integrated CRM-communications system can help you learn how your sales staff work. It can enable you to better support them during the sales process. And it will ensure that you keep your customers happy for the long term.
Why should you consider integrating your CRM with your business communications?
1) Manage your resource planning.
Do you know how many calls are actually being made to your customers and prospects? And in turn, do you have enough sales support to handle this call volume? Synching your communications system with your CRM means you can start to determine how many people you need to handle your sales funnel and scale accordingly.
2) Better manage your people.
Are certain members of your sales team looking frazzled and overworked? Or alternatively, staff who seem to be breezing through their day? Are there times of the year when your sales pipeline peaks and troughs? Integrated CRM and communications systems help you to understand the volume of work each individual has on, so you can help staff to manage their time and prioritise workload for enhanced efficiency and productivity. Likewise, you can begin to shift work between team members, so work volumes are fairer.
3) Know your sales team’s personality types.
Which members of your sales team are most productive in the morning, who peaks at lunchtime, and who’s an evening caller? Who has a regular calling pattern throughout the week, and or who heads off early before the weekend?! By linking your communications system to your CRM, you can learn about your individual sales members, and how to motivate them.
4) Make your marketing campaigns more effective.
Integrating your communications system with your CRM can help you to better track the success of your marketing campaign, calculate the ROI of the campaign, fine-tune your campaign strategy to improve results and increase sales leads and opportunities. Read: Measuring Marketing Success With a Cloud Phone System for more details.
By integrating your communications systems with your CRM, you can keep your sales team and customers happy, and achieve business growth.
To learn more about integrating your business communications with the Salesforce CRM platform, visit the below:
Originally published Apr 24, 2014, updated Oct 14, 2020
