Technology can support many aspects of your work, from operating heavy machinery to providing assistance with daily tasks in the office. Certain types of software can even help your sales department. Here are six ways different programs can help you upgrade your sales.
1. Ecommerce Tools Improve Transaction Safety And Efficiency
Ecommerce is one of the most important ways people conduct business transactions. It refers to commerce that takes place online, such as online shopping and investing. There are various tools related to ecommerce that you can incorporate into your current ecommerce infrastructure, such as multichannel ecommerce tools, encryption programs and shopping cart recovery widgets, ERP program integration and accounting automation.
2. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software Supports Client Relationships
CRMs manage your sales team’s interactions with current customers, leads and prospects. They allow you to collect data on customers and leads and your interactions with them, track the customer journey, and store and organize the information you collect for analysis. This allows you to refine and improve your methods for managing existing customers, generating leads and nurturing your relationship with prospects to turn them into customers. The analysis you perform based on this data and the generation of new customers will ultimately help your business to grow.
3. Accounting Software Helps You Meet Goals
Utilize accounting software to ensure your sales associates meet your goals and that your sales team as a whole meets company goals. Your employees can use this software to track invoices and expenses. They can also use it to check for repeat customers, keep records of late payments, and create expense, transaction and sales reports. Some accounting software provides templates for you to utilize and these programs are generally customizable.
4. Operations Management Software Supports Your Employees’ Workflows
Operations management software is important no matter what department you’re involved in. Your sales team can benefit from the streamlining, automation and support aspects of operations management tools. These tools ensure that your sales associates can focus on the more creative and customer-facing aspects of their work, such as lead generation, sales pitches, marketing and market research. The operations management tool can take care of many repetitive tasks such as data management.
5. Project Management Software Supports Agile Workflows
You can use project management software such as Jira and Salesforce to facilitate agile workflows. Taking the agile approach means working quickly and efficiently based on software development workflows. Rather than spending months perfecting every aspect of an offering or process, you work on it in a series of two-week sprints. These sprints allow you to complete your offering or process in one sprint and then continue to refine it in subsequent sprints. For sales, this means you can make your actual sales process or your onboarding process agile. Sales processes can be broken down into their component parts and each part can be completed during one sprint. Onboarding can be similarly broken down, with each new employee receiving two weeks of basic training, then two weeks of more training for each sales process while he or she performs basic sales work.
6. Sales Training Programs Help Your Employees Improve
Not every program you use needs to support customer-facing workflows directly. Training programs are just as important to your sales team’s efficiency and progress as CRMs and project management software. These programs enable employees to more successfully, efficiently and accurately use your various sales tools. They can also help you save money and get new employees started on their jobs more quickly by speeding up the onboarding process and making it more comprehensive for new employees. Most sales training programs are easily customizable, so you can easily incorporate training on any programs you use.
Make sure you choose software that makes sense for your sales teams. If certain programs can be easily integrated with your existing technological infrastructure or can improve your sales team’s current workflows, then those are the ones you should invest in.
