Is your Sales Process working for your Small Business?

7th November 2019

You know better than anyone how your business works, but have you considered whether your processes are working to increase your profitability, or actually working against you?

It’s often said that every business is a sales organisation so getting the steps of your sales process spot on is crucial to supporting your sales team, whatever its size. It is important to ensure maximum efficiency and that your sales manager and sales team members have the support that they need. With the correct infrastructure in place identifying potential customers and closing deals becomes their primary purpose, not wasting time, energy and most importantly money on admin tasks

But how do you create a sales process? 

You’ve got a business plan with a series of objectives, right? Using those objectives should help frame your sales targets and the resources you need to achieve them.

Consider who your target audience is and where they are likely to be reached. What are the pain points that you will have to overcome? Position your product or service to solve their problem and you will have the framework of a plan.

Not forgetting potential compliance issues. Chief among those are the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) introduced in May 2018 and of which all businesses are bound by if they process personal data. So it is imperative that correct standards are met when storing and using data.

How are you going to sell?

Are you going to use a telesales function to make phone calls as a part of your plan? Will you use a sales rep to visit your prospects, or utilise your website as a destination and drive traffic there via google or social media? What about using data mining tools to generate leads or networking and so on? The possibilities are endless.

“Your sales will descend into chaos without a clear, user-friendly process in place.”

Irrespective of whether you’re an SME with up to 250 employees, a micro business with just you or one or two staff, or in the small business sector employing over 10 people, getting this right will see you putting bigger numbers onto your net income, and your financial statements and reporting will be much clearer.

Where are you going to start?

There is of course a perfect place to start. Have you considered a CRM solution?

“Customer relationship management software, if used properly, can power your sales process from a single platform.”

But there are a few prerequisites for it to work for your business:

• GDPR Compliance
  • Is the software based in the EU? Is the country the servers are housed in compliant?
  • Look for a user-friendly set of tools that will help you, and not create unwanted admin tasks.
  • Can you monitor easily without slowing your sales function?
• User-friendly
  • Does your CRM software have easy to use dashboards – can they be customised easily to suit your sales process and does it have the flexibility to meet the future needs of your business?
  • Does your CRM system come with enough support? Is the support team based in the UK? Can you access it easily and are the people on the end of the phone fully trained not only in the functionality of the CRM but do they really understand the sales process?
  • Does your CRM include intuitive dashboards and features? Is your sales team able to use it to power up their activity rather than spend their time on admin. Do the features provide real benefits?
  • Can you manage user access easily and set targets, manage each user and monitor their performance? Can you manage new team members and people who move on seamlessly without losing momentum in your sales pipeline?
• Reporting
  • Can you create custom reports that are relevant to your business that you can automate so that your CRM does the work rather than you? Your reporting can be used as a powerful tool in your sales meetings and becomes a driver rather than something that is produced and never fully used.
• Integrations
  • Are you are automating your sales or marketing processes? For example, using your website to generate leads. Do you have access to high quality, effective integrations that meet your needs?
  • Connecting your email platform and data mining tool adds powerful functionality to your CRM and support to your sales team.
  • Can your sales team see financial data? Having some information can help them to identify existing opportunities to sell additional products or services to.
  • Sharing data on ‘bad payers’ with your team is also useful. But you may not want your team to see all of your financials. So an integration with your accounting package can provide useful data.
  • Integrations are better than manual labour. Get set up with the right integrations and your CRM will sit between your systems and sales team. They are automated, have very little need for admin and power up your CRM.
• Driving Sales
  • It’s perfectly simple – Will a CRM help you to manage your sales process effectively and reduce the admin load on your sales team? If the answer to this question is yes, then you’ve found the perfect place to start investing in, to improve your profitability and help your sales soar.

Here at SET For Business, we are continually developing our CRM so that our clients have the very best experience. It is designed to be easy to use and is a fully customisable, flexible system that will help your sales soar. Tools designed to help you maintain GDPR compliance are included. We have integrated SET CRM with software platforms that we believe add real value and will benefit your business and sales process.

But the proof is in the pudding! Try SET CRM out for FREE for 30 days.

All of the features are live in the trial and we provide full UK based support so that you can get to grips with the benefits that our CRM will bring to your business.