The modern sales industry is a complex machine, with lots of moving parts. But did you know that investing in CRM integrations sales could help elevate your team and close more deals?

Due to its incredibly competitive nature, providing customers with a positive experience is key to securing your business stands out from the crowd.

Whatever the size of your business, a CRM integration a huge advantage to have over the competition.

In fact, according to Salesforce, CRM applications can help to increase sales by up to 29%, sales productivity by up to 34% and sales forecast accuracy by 42%.

CloudCall was designed and created with sales teams in mind. So, we understand the time-pressured environments that sales teams can operate in. Equally, we understand just how long it can take to search for a customer record or upload detailed call notes manually to your CRM system.

Sales consultants spend a significant amount of time making calls to prospective customers and clients, whilst working on storing these interactions into their CRM. However, many are experiencing disjointed customer and client journeys.

This is primarily because the various touch points within the business operate within separate silos. For instance, it is still rare to see sales professionals working from a single system that gives a unified view of a customer.

These disparate systems need to be connected for sales teams to work more efficiently. And to close more sales, quicker.

Introducing, CRM integrations for sales

To bridge this gap between your phone and your CRM system, you should invest in a CRM-telephony integration.

Did you know that 52% of businesses say that a lack of integration into a CRM system is slowing them down on the phone?

This means that you’re not likely to get a true representation of how your team members are performing. On the flip side, getting your team to self-assess their own performance can also be skewed. Not to mention where and how to collate and make use of this data.

When you manage your CRM system and your calls separately, you miss out on important data about your processes.

If you invest in a CRM integration, however, you’ll notice multiple benefits. Here’s 3 ways in which CRM integrations for sales will allow your team to thrive:

1. Compiling a library of past calls can help you with training, monitoring and compliance.
2. Syncing call data into your CRM system generates powerful business intelligence and reporting.
3. Real-time data and call stats allow you to easily oversee your team and offer crucial support during live calls.

So, what do we recommend? Let’s start with the basics….

Sales can be a tricky business and optimizing your processes can be a bit bewildering at first. So where should you begin?

We suggest that IT managers, sales directors, CRM admins and CEOs start with a look at the building blocks of their operations.

The first question you may ask yourself is ‘is your sales team hitting their Key Performance Indicators?’ Yes? That’s great!

No? Probably a good time to question if your team are having quality conversations with customers.

The best sales strategies are often discovered by trial and error – so review and amend tactics if they’re not working as well as you hoped.

Your sales team might be very hard working, but you could still be unknowingly missing out on a whole other level of success.

Drilling down into the figures can help you understand how effective your salespeople are. But constantly doing manual checks and getting them to create performance reports isn’t an efficient use of your time or theirs.

To get an idea of just how valuable CRM integrations for sales are for your business, you need to understand the ways it can improve your sales.

If adopted and used correctly, a CRM integration is going to boost the performance of any sales team. Well… *shameless plug*, our integrations certainly will anyway!

Monitoring and training

Having the ability to monitor your teams’ calls and activity in real-time will provide you with a great overview of how things are going.

We know that everyone will be on their best behaviour if they know they’re being evaluated, but does that always paint a genuine portrait of what is happening? CloudCall’s reporting features allow you to get a realistic picture of your sales teams’ actual performance at the click of a button.

Want an added bonus? You can even support teams with real-time guidance so that call standards are always first-rate. With the extra benefit of being able to record and listen back to calls, you can easily provide feedback to your salespeople, helping with professional development. The route to success is getting clearer and clearer!

Here’s some CloudCall features to help you do it:

• Supervisor panel – get an instant birds-eye view of what calls are being conducted when, for how long, and whether or not they hit the mark
• Monitor– Listen to calls to ensure your brand values are consistently aligned
• Whisper – offer real-time suggestions to your team to keep them on track
• Barge – the show must go wrong, and now you’ll be able to save the day when it does by taking over a flagging call

CloudCall makes business communications quicker and more powerful. Our leading cloud-based phone system fully integrates with CRM systems to make your life easier.

Consider Technical and Support Requirements

It is important to know what infrastructure you’ll need to have in place to implement a telephony solution. Make sure that the one you choose works with your current phone system or provides one if necessary. Now, nobody likes change, and getting your team on board with sales process changes is never easy. But today’s businesses need to adapt quickly to changes in their industry and to meet the demands of their customers. When changes in sales processes need to be made, it’s important they are rolled out quickly and seamlessly.

Here are some techniques that will help with adoption:

• Verbal and written: Lay out the process changes in writing and verbally. Simply sending an email isn’t enough. And neither is having a meeting. You must do both. Emphasize your rationale and importance of the change in person and then lay out the technical information in writing for reference.
• Lunch and learn: People will be much more eager to give you their time if you offer them something in return – in this case food. Now, simply offering a slice of pizza isn’t enough to ensure the sales team will change their habits, but at least they’ll listen to your spiel. So, try a lunch and learn.
• Communicate results: Make sure to tell the team what benefits you are achieving from the change in process. Are you generating better reports since you have changed your order process? Then show the team. It’s hard for people to make a change if they don’t see the benefits.
• Reward: Encourage people to embrace the new rules by incentivizing good habits. Offer a reward to those who adopt the new process quickly. Something as little as bagels for breakfast or a gift card go a long way.

People can be stubborn, but if there’s a good reason to make the change it shouldn’t be hard to communicate its value and get the team on board.

CloudCall’s CRM integrations for sales

Implementing integrated communications into your sales CRM system using CloudCall is straightforward and highly cost effective, facilitating a clear return on investment. But we would say that, right? Don’t just take our word for it, see what our customers have to say about our integrations. By linking your phone system to your CRM, you can almost instantly increase your efficiency and gain ongoing, fresh insight at the same time. Being able to automatically monitor your teams’ calls and stats provides you with an accurate, instant and realistic view of what’s going on is vital. That’s why CloudCall has real-time monitoring features built in, so you’re always up to date.

If you’d like to know more about how CloudCall can help to elevate your sales team, you can get in touch with our friendly and helpful sales team or book a demo!

You know you want to.