Oct 22, 2019

How To Empower Your Sales Team Through Data

Data. Everyone’s talking about it, and everyone – even small businesses – gather inordinate amounts of it every day. For many companies the data just sits there – likely in their POS, CRM, ERP or WMS systems.

Sad thing is, most people know there is a lot of valuable information in that data. For this discussion, let’s focus on CRM platforms.

Ask a group of sales-related folks how many like their current CRM, and you’ll see few hands raised. Then ask how many realize the value of the information within their CRM, and you’ll see most, if not all, hands go up. So what’s the problem?

Specifically, CRM data entry and retrieval in some companies takes upward of 25 percent of the sales team’s time. Conversely, a recent Forbes study shows salespeople spend only 22 percent of each day actively selling, defined as time spent on the phone, emailing or face-to-face with a customer or prospect.

Apparently, the remaining 53 percent of time is spent in meetings, other administrative tasks or on personal distractions (social media, calls, etc.). Since those items are under each company’s control, there’s not much we can do about that as a group.

But what if we could take that 25 percent spent on the CRM and cut it down by even five percent, giving salespeople more time with customers and prospects? In a full-time work year, that’s an extra 104 hours with clients and potential clients for each sales team member. Multiply that across a sales team, and that’s a lot of potential revenue lost due to menial, administrative tasks.

So how do we shift that five percent? In our company, we empower each member of our sales team with a business companion, but not the kind that sits at a desk and answers phones. Our companion’s name is Athena, and she is the virtual voice behind the ConverSight.ai platform.

Athena helps each member of our sales team use their mobile device or desktop to retrieve information from our CRM including sales goals, customer notes, deal opportunities, upcoming meetings and any other information available in the data – simply through a voice request or typed chat.

What’s more, Athena allows our SDRs, sales managers and directors instant access to this data in the form of reports, pinboards and so much more. No more added expense for outsourcing report creation, and no more lag time waiting for someone in the IT department to extract this information and build a report.

And the best part – Athena does this for about half the cost of an FTE. While she helps in sales, she also assists in the manufacturing facility, warehouse, logistics and transportation. And she never takes a break.

If you aren’t yet using a business companion on your team, you should look into one.

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