Growing a high-performance sales team is incredibly rewarding, but it does not come without its challenges. Once you commit to managing to a standard, the responsibility lies with the manager to accurately capture and track activity and the sales KPIs that matter. In terms of tracking activity, CRM provides visibility into key sales metrics. However, too many sales teams today are relying on manual data entry processes to keep their CRMs up-to-date, leaving lots of room for manual error. 

A sales organization’s CRM platform is often the first pressure point where rapid growth may have a negative impact without the right data, and unfortunately, it is a critical spot where early bad habits can quickly become expensive ones. Just like cops want to spend their time busting bad guys instead of filing paperwork at the precinct, sales reps want to be in front of customers, rather than doing data entry into a web-database.

But, if you let this process drive rep behavior and expectations, you are limiting not just how quickly teams can grow, but their overall effectiveness as well. Without accurate activity data, managers are unable to correctly measure the sales KPIs that matter to effectively train and manage their growing sales teams.  In fact, the problem only gets worse the bigger the team gets.

Improve the Accuracy of Your Sales KPIs

When your growing team is still manually updating your CRM, you will find their behavior falls into at least one of these categories:

  • Not updating with enough detail, creating incomplete records
  • Making sloppy mistakes, resulting in inaccurate CRM data
  • Forgetting to consistently update your CRM, making it difficult to track sales KPIs over time and leaving you to chase down information with phone calls and emails

Research shows that 85% of businesses’ CRM systems house between 10% and 40% of bad records, more than half of which were created by human error. This bad data has a direct impact on the bottom line, with the typical American business giving up 12% of its annual revenue due to inaccurate data. No matter how quickly your team is growing, you do not want to lose opportunities to lousy data.

Without a clear understanding of the things that make your team’s engine run, new hires will miss out on sufficient training in the areas that matter most. You then become lost in a feedback loop of poor performance.  Doesn’t that sound like fun? If that sounds like your sales team – you are not alone.

The proliferation of high-quality CRM platforms has given sales leaders powerful tools for analyzing existing data in the system. However, it is time for sales organizations to take those tools to the next level by improving the accuracy of the data they contain. Fast-growing sales teams need more than just a robust CRM platform – they need a smarter collection process that is populated with objective, precise sales KPIs that are automatically collected.

Access Real-Time Data with Sales Intelligence

To gain access to more accurate data and the KPIs managers need, a sales intelligence tool is the answer you are looking for. Sales intelligence provides real-time data and on-demand visualization of sales productivity. Utilizing this technology allows for unprecedented insights into the call activity of reps. This allows managers to identify the behaviors that work and those that do not.

With sales intelligence, managers have accurate data at their fingertips. The technology identifies the right metrics to measure the activity of reps and provides quantifiable data as a baseline for coaching and training. Real-time goal tracking allows managers can see the sales KPIs that matter, ensuring that reps are making the right number of calls and adhering to best practices.

Automatic call logging without any manual entry guarantees a seamless entry into your CRM with the most up-to-date data on your sales team. Track phone-based activity, gap-to-goal status and call data including the number of calls made, frequency of dial, average talk time and call result (set an appointment, follow up, etc.). Further, reports that can be integrated into your pipeline provide 100% visibility into the activities of every agent.

Having this data allows you to measure the right sales KPIs, as you can only improve on the statistics you are aware of. As a result, managers have the resources to make smarter decisions, optimize their teams’ sales performance and set benchmarks for success based on real data.

Apply Accurate CRM Insights

A sales intelligence (SI) system may automatically collect CRM data, but it is up to you as a manager to use it to your advantage and keep up with the demands of your growing sales team. Here’s how:

  1. Keep track of which salespeople have set appointments or taken follow-up actions with which accounts using sales intelligence. The insight into success is your greatest asset for creating goals and identifying KPIs.
  2. Translate great meetings in the field into weekly CRM reports with data provided by your SI tool. This will allow you to see the behaviors and agents that are achieving success and why.
  3. During ad-hoc update calls and check-in emails, your reps always have promising news about the actions they are taking to push prospects through the sales cycle. An SI tool is the best way to track the effectiveness of these actions and note the patterns of individual agents along the way.
  4. Ensure your team is consistently on the same page with each account by holding weekly check-ins to review your team’s performance using SI data. This encourages reps to focus on both immediate prospects and current customers and allows team members to collaborate to reach their goals.
  5. Instead of spending hours each week creating reports that are based on data you know is incomplete or inaccurate, utilize your SI tool to create up-to-date monthly and quarterly reports. This will also give you more time as a manager to train and coach your team, instead of performing administrative work that can be done automatically.

All of these points, with the integration of sales intelligence, greatly increase the usefulness of a CRM platform and management’s visibility into sales performance.

Increase Visibility and Performance

CRMs are often a pain point for a growing sales team, and that pain comes in the form of inaccurate and incomplete sales metrics. The problem stems from a reliance on manual processes for collecting sales activity data, as manual entry often results in an error. Inaccurate data severely limits sales leaders’ visibility, a critical problem for managers of dispersed teams that costs businesses real money.

However, businesses can stand apart from their competition just from adopting technologies that improve the accuracy of their sales KPIs. By automating data input into their CRM with a sales intelligence system, managers gain access to the metrics that matter and greater visibility into the performance patterns of their reps. Therefore, they are better equipped to manage and drive their teams towards meaningful goals and higher revenue generation.

Would you like to learn how Gryphon can help your organization improve your team’s sales performance and track the KPIs that matter most to you? Click here for a demo!

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