Sales are truly an impeccable fuel to drive a business. Perhaps this is what makes enhancing sales productivity a crucial part of any organization’s success. Particularly in the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) sector where attracting and retaining customers is highly competitive, this eventually calls for a proficient solution that helps in boosting the efficiency of your team.
According to a report, 91% of surveyed companies agreed on CRM playing a crucial role in helping them achieve their revenue goals. Not just this, a Forester report unveiled, CRM helped organizations from the financial industry improve the productivity of their employees. Having good CRM software onboard can serve your company in an unmatched way.
CRMs help to save time that is wasted in repetitive administrative tasks, makes customer engagements more efficient, gives a 360 degree view of the customers so that banks and financial institutions can engage with them, anticipate their needs and guide them through their financial journey.
However, before we take a deeper dive and explore further, let’s first know:
Challenges Faced in the Banking Sector while Increasing Sales Productivity
Let’s learn about some of the most common challenges faced while increasing the productivity of your sales representatives. Let’s have a look at them.
- Obsolete work process: Most companies think that sales representatives will waste their time updating information on software and doing data entry. Over this, they prefer building relations with present customers and potential clients on 1-to-1. However, they need to understand that over time things have changed and so have user expectations.
- Not being focused: According to research, sales representatives on average spend 8% time in qualifying leads and just 6% in understanding their customers. This eventually creates a gap between them, giving rise to a lack of understanding. Experts believe sales reps should prioritize spending more time on analyzing and understanding customer needs. This will increase their conversion rate.
- Lack of training: While CRM software adds to the productivity of your sales representatives, they alone can’t reach desired results if your team isn’t qualified or trained enough to justify the product in front of the customer. Inability to do that can’t be rectified by any software.
- Adopting new technology: Getting acquainted with new software or tools may prove to be a little problematic for some sales reps. Though there isn’t any rocket science involved, proper knowledge about the software and being open to adopting it can solve this challenge and help your sales team attain desired goals.
Looking at these sales productivity challenges of banking and finance sector, the next possible thing we should talk about is:
8 Ways CRM can Increase Sales Productivity for Financial Services
According to a report shared by Gartner, a well-crafted CRM software can help increase revenue by 41% / sales representative. While the figures are alluring, it’s important to first learn about the ways in which the productivity of your sales team can be increased. Let us have a look at some key metrics you need to keep in mind.
- Immediate Access to Crucial Information: Having CRM software onboard, you can stay assured of knowing everything. You can access all the vital information related to your financial sector clients, upcoming meeting notes, and much more just from a tap on your mobile device. Not just this, it further assists by keeping you notified about daily schedules.
- Close More Information in Less Time: Acknowledging that having all the information handy, you’ll be eventually able to resolve and take action on each of them promptly. Not just this, since you’ll have all the data in hand, there are least chances of making a mistake. Besides, with the saved time, you can prioritize and accomplish other tasks.
- Attract New Opportunities: Since a CRM helps you seamlessly interact with your banking and financial services customers and manage their details securely through your laptop and mobile phone. With this, you also get the liberty to use the stored information and add new details remotely or while on the move. Staying updated with customer information will eventually help you close prevailing deals while delivering a flawless experience. And a satisfied customer is the most valuable asset for creating a brand identity and boosting revenue.
- Quick Information Sharing: another aspect that plays a crucial role in your performance is sharing information and details with the team members or those directly associated with a project. With a well-crafted CRM at your service, you can share all forms of information with everyone that’s connected and authorized to access it.
- Monitor Goals: Professionals don’t just believe in attaining benchmarks, they thrive to keep a real-time track of benchmarks set and goals to be attained. Besides, every new deal and client has a new lesson for the team. While remaining updated with your journey towards set goals, you can stay motivated to attain the same.
- Helps Define Target Audience: For the banking business, it’s important for the team to know who their target audience is and eventually take marketing and sales activity based on the same. Some of the customers are commercial banks, insurance companies, cooperatives, mutual funds and other smaller financial entities. Knowing the target audience is vital because it helps you in defining the steps to approach and engage your customers and potential customers. Needless to mention, age, gender, geographical location, preferences, etc plays a crucial role in outlining user expectations and behaviour. Once you crack the algorithm for the same, nothing can refrain you from boosting your productivity.
- Lead Qualification: Not always your agents might be able to come across a customer that is willing to buy. Having said this, you would not want your resources to waste their time on leads that have the least/no chances of conversion. Wondering what is needed? This is where you must qualify a lead. To do this, you need to first ensure that the customer is from your buyer persona. Once the first step is cleared, it’s time to find the expected time in which they are planning to buy and the manner in which they are linked with your brand. Once you have answers to all, you can easily find whether your team should invest time on a potential customer or not.
- Track Proposals: Irrespective of the deal you are willing to close, a proposal is an inseparable part of it. Having the liberty to create proposals quickly and share them across the team, while tracking the progress on a real-time basis, can indeed be an enchanting experience. Also, with this, you can better excavate the part where your proposal didn’t go well or it performed as per the expectation. The need to learn this is to point out loopholes and strengths and utilize them accordingly.
How to Improve CRM System for Financial Services
Depending on the CRM you buy or the one that is already installed in your organization, there’s a checklist you must not forget to ensure unearthing the complete capabilities of your CRM tool. Here are the top 4 points that you should keep in mind while choosing or using CRM software for the financial sector.
- Mobility is the key: One of the best advantages of technology is that it gives you the liberty to access information while on the move. To crack this, you can either choose to install a new mobile CRM or include one in your prevailing CRM tool. Either way, you’ll bestow your team with an unmatched efficiency to work effortlessly and enhance their overall productivity. According to a report published, 65% of sales representatives attained their set targets using mobile CRM.
- Integrate Essential CRM Applications: Another way to boost the usability of your current CRM system is by integrating essential CRM applications like Marketing Automation, Document Management, Customer Support, Accounting, and more. While each app has its distinct purpose to serve, it depends on you to choose the one that fits perfectly with your current expectations. However, experts believe, these are some of the basic apps/functionalities that ideally a CRM should possess.
- Social Media Platforms: These digital arenas are altogether a different world to interact and engage with your target audience. Users prefer to share their feedback and learn about new products, services, and offers on these social media platforms. Not just start-ups and SMBs, even successful brands are leveraging the benefits of being present on different social media platforms. You must consider integrating your CRM with social media platforms. This will not just help you listen to customers’ feedback; you’ll connect with their sentiments and eventually create unbiased goodwill in front of them.
- Mobilize Sales Process: While this may sound similar to one of our previous points, the fact is, it’s not. By mobilizing your sales process; we intend to bring your attention to making sales an easy process for buyers and your team. This includes everything from tracking the leads to converting them and generating revenue. From the buyer’s perspective, this includes maintaining data and providing them a personalized experience every time they connect with your company. Having all of this anytime and anywhere can truly work wonders for your team and the company.
3 Key CRM Features to Drive Sales Productivity for Financial Services
According to a report, CRM has helped brands boost their sales productivity by 34%. Though numbers speak for themselves, let us not go blindly after it and explore different ways in which CRM features can help boost the productivity of your sales representatives.
- Lead allocation: The first thing that you do after getting the leads is, allocate them to your sales representatives. While we try and take utmost precautions, chances of human error are still possible. To surpass this, it’s crucial to ensure that every sales representative gets a unique lead without any mismatch. This includes the area covered by them and not allocating the same lead to other representatives. With good CRM software, you can do this entire process error-free, which will further ensure that all your leads are with the right resource.
- Performance Management: The second most important part is keeping track of the team’s performance. This will also help you analyze the progress report of your leads and loopholes that can be fixed to enhance the overall performance and ROI. In a research done by Nucleus, it was revealed that the average ROI for CRM is 1:8.27. Having said this, a good CRM not only directly improves the productivity of your employees but also helps you earn more through it in many other ways.
- Setting up targets for the sales team: There’s a famous quote, “do your duty and don’t worry about the results”. The primary intention behind it was that you don’t forget to perform while thinking of results. However, for sales representatives, the target is the most crucial part of their responsibilities. With CRM software onboard, you can’t just set up targets for your team; you can also notify them about progress and keep a real-time track of the progress. This will undoubtedly help you in making better decisions.
Concluding Note
With this write-up, we tried covering all the vital points that you should know before or while using CRM software. It can’t be denied that the tool can be of immense help in enhancing the productivity of your team and increasing sales, it’s important to know the ways you can use it like a pro. We hope the points are clear and can be understood easily.
Just in case there’s anything else you’d like to know, let’s connect in the comment section and learn more about the best uses of CRM software for the banking and financial industry.
This article provides a helpful overview of the benefits of CRM for sales productivity.