Information about customers and their needs is an important part of any business, so the necessary task is to maintain its relevance. It can be used in sales, building long-term relationships with customers, preparing recurring transactions, additional sales (upsale), concluding service contracts after the sale of goods, etc.
Information is important for sales, the organization of the sales process is a big task. One of the key moments in many businesses is the definition and establishment of a typical “Sales Funnel” for this business - a sequence of events in which a potential client from the “left-most state”, where he can only unclearly feel the problem, goes into the “right-most state” when, to mutual satisfaction, a transaction is made between him and the supplier.
Where is the funnel?
Whether in a big company, in a small business, the sales department should be able to automate those processes that give in to it. In a very simplified form, the Seller must “move” the transaction from its initial status, where the customer only showed interest, to the final stage, where the customer not only paid for the service or product, but received and looks satisfied.
In the most general way, for the Client, such steps (for different businesses, their number and essence may differ slightly) can be designated as:
Motivation> Interest> Decision> Action.
At the same time, for the Seller, such a funnel may look like this:
Ability to make a deal> Commercial offer> Agreement of documents> Signature and payment> Implementation> Closing.
Automate it
How does this help CRM? It is clear that if all sales processes looked like a flash in the excited brain of a client, resulting in immediate payment of the bill, then there would be no craters. But parting with money is, in most cases, a meaningful process, and in the free world, a person, besides choosing “buy - not buy”, also has choices “from whom to buy?”, And “when is it better to buy?”, Etc. . Working with sales stages allows you to customize the set of actions of the seller and the departments that work with him so that the features and requirements of each of these stages are taken into account. If the client is ready for the demonstration of goods, solutions, then it is necessary to carry out a demonstration with him, and not to continue stubbornly talking about what you are better than a competitor, or vice versa - slip the bill to him already.
For example, most likely, it will be very presumptuous to offer an annual subscription to the gym to someone who has just thought about his physical form. But to give him a free trial lesson for such a moment will be just right. That is, the correct qualification of the “status” of the client allows to act adequately and unobtrusively in relation to him.
Ideally, CRM with the help of various “triggers” and “robots” to some extent leads the seller from stage to stage, as if prompting: “you sat down for something at the stage of“ discussing the general proposal ”, it's time to either move to the stage” Demonstration ”, or reduce the priority of this transaction and transfer efforts to another transaction. And the system of fast reporting in CRM allows managers to analyze the quality of work by stages, observing key indicators by objectives: how many transactions at this stage, how many at that. Making adjustments if the analysis, for example, shows that the seller or the entire department is “lame” at the proposal approval stage: there is a large percentage of losses - the sellers communicate well, hold telephone conversations, develop interest, conduct high-quality demonstrations, but cannot protect the proposal objections do not know how to handle, customers lend themselves to more nimble competitors. Who bothered to “chew” on the client some items of the conditions of delivery and guarantees, and in your offer they seemed unclear to the client, and he had doubts. Although on the whole he quite liked your proposal. Perhaps sellers in such cases lack some information, need additional training, etc.
Small retreat
We already have a product IP-PBX Zeon, we have added to it the functions of CRM. This is convenient for our current customers who are already using PBX. They just take another module and get CRM. But many new customers do not need PBX in its full understanding (queue management, complex call processing schemes, call center reports, connection to calls, etc.) - they don’t want to pay extra for it. They need CRM with PBX functions. Based on this, we are creating a new product (we will present the name in future articles), where the PBX is pushed into the background, and the CRM comes to the front. Do not be surprised when we juggle several names - we do not want to confuse everyone, it is just necessary.Funnel implementation
We did not reinvent the wheel and go against the market. The funnel at us is realized in the form of "Kanban". Stages are presented in the form of vertical columns, and in them cards are deals. All cards are sorted by date, top-down.
There are two roles in the system: the Seller (they can also call him “Sales Manager”, or simply “Manager” in everyday life) and the Manager. The seller sees and manages only his cards. The manager sees all the cards and reports.
The seller can create a deal from a pop-up card or by clicking the “New deal” button. Also, “System” can create a transaction automatically (for example, you can configure all new incoming calls to create a transaction), then the transaction goes to the “Unassembled” column, and the Seller who picked up the phone will be responsible.
When the transaction has moved on, the Seller moves the card to another column.
Or it changes the status in the transaction card, by selecting a stage from the list.
Sellers have the opportunity to work with each transaction in accordance with the requirements of the stage, and to allocate their working time and effort, following the priorities set. For example: 1) “at the stage“ Conclusion of a transaction ”there are almost no transactions - it means that you need to work more closely with transactions from the stage“ Coordination of an offer ”. Or: 2) “almost all possible deals took place, a vacuum will soon appear - you need to return to the beginning of the funnel,” etc.
In custody
In conjunction with the “Tasks” module, which we will discuss in future articles, the process of working with transactions in the funnel becomes even more manageable.
The telephone nature of our product allows us to address it to companies where the priority at the moment is to build uninterrupted communications, and the rich functionality of existing CRM systems is still cumbersome and mostly unclaimed.
Regards,
iptelefon team.