Shaping Future Sales CRM

Current enterprise applications are developed to stimulate business processes and improve productivity. They are built primarily to record transactions and create a validated source of truth - mundane and administrative with limited co-relation to end goal! In addition, there is lack of an integrated view to be able to derive intelligence from the huge transactional data and achieve the set business objectives.

So, if company’s objective is to maximize its sales, the current CRMs will help in creating a flow to capture the leads, qualifying the leads, tracking lead conversions and finally recording sales. There is no automated way to derive intelligence basis lead information and improve sales throughput in real time. 

 Changes in the offing

A paradigm shift is required from the transactional application to data-driven -objective-oriented application. Let’s focus on data driven sales application (CRM).

The prime task of any Sales organization is to convert leads and close deals. CRMs of future in this context will move a step further than just being a system for data recording. It will provide guided assistance on ways to build prospect pipeline, deliver customer experience, increase the sales, etc. 

Some key trends that will shape future CRMs:

• From transactions only to recording complete user journey

There would be marked movement from recording only transactions to entire CRM user journey. Complete workflow will focus on how to make the user successful in achieving business objectives. There will be natural collaboration when user journeys will intersect. This way efforts will be directed towards achieving individual tasks as well as larger organization objective. In the context of Sales, it would mean more lead conversion and improved sales productivity.

• In-built business intelligence

Some enterprise applications currently provide dashboards and interactive intelligence. In future, this capability would be amplified further in the context of story-telling and providing actionable insights that leads to logical steps in user journey.

• Predictive Analytics

There will be extensive use of predictive analytics backed by Machine learning within CRM to provide scripted guided assistant to sales representatives at each step and improve sales throughput overall.

• Knowledge on the go

On the go quality and user training using speech to text, semantic analytics, NLP and knowledge bots. These will provide real time feedback and ensure effectiveness and speed.

• Gamification

Sales gamification will improve adoption. This will further improve productivity, increase collaboration within the team and eventually enhance sales throughput.

A truly Symbiotic Relationship       

Data proliferation has initiated changes in the CRM tools which is only going to multi-fold soon. At the base of it all is the integrated view of what it entails – for sales person and other roles in the sales eco-system. It shall bring actionable insights at the disposal of the sales reps enabling them to prospect potential customers with accuracy and deliver much desired customer experience in sync with the business objectives of sales optimization.