What do you do if you want to boost your direct sales using cloud-based platforms?

You can get a lot of value from a CRM but also a lot of organizations put too much focus on functionality rather than best practice and good Sales maturity and user adoption. If you don’t get adoption from the users and they don’t see the value then they are not going to use it. The CRM needs to be an information provider not an information sucker that users think just wastes their time.

In my experience, using a CRM is key to success, but as a full source of truth and information. In other words, all activity, contacts, leads, conversations should be logged within the system in order to reap the benefits of using the system. To get buy-in it’s important to show your sales team the value of how it can help them stay organized and ultimately allowing them to bring in more business for the organization. Using automation for marketing and outreach sequences, also task reminders is another way to make sure that sales is staying on top of responsibilities to our clients and internal teams.

Cloud-based platforms can be a game-changer for direct sales. Leverage them to empower your team with real-time customer data and mobile access to sales tools. Automate tasks like order processing and commission calculations. Utilize features for social selling and online lead generation. By streamlining operations and boosting team mobility, cloud platforms can significantly enhance your direct sales efforts.

To some extent, analyzing data can help in identifying areas for improvement and new markets to explore. However, it's important to avoid getting too caught up in certain reports and metrics. For instance, consider a sales pipeline graph of all open opportunities categorized by the stage they are in and the predicted close date. It may seem like we have a healthy pipeline of opportunities, but if users keep updating the close dates to further into the future, we will never actually close any revenue.

The automation of tasks can be hugely helpful when you automate a process that will always happen, I.e an update of a record at a particular point of the process or creating records based on an event happening in a connected record. I feel caution should be used when creating automatic tasks to follow up with clients/ chase contracts, payments etc. Too many tasks and they’ll start to get ignored by the sales team.

What else do you need!? As much as the cloud makes everything easily accessible many companies are still having to deal with legacy systems that house silos of data. How can the important information from these systems be consumed into the cloud? So you have everything you need where you need it.