A good customer relationship management (CRM) system is an essential tool for any business looking to ramp up its sales efforts. Underscoring the point, 91 percent of businesses with 10 or more employees report using a CRM. Not only that, in 2018 alone, businesses large and small spent a combined $48.2 billion on CRM solutions. And while much has been written about why CRMs are so important, the reality is that when used on their own, getting the results you’re looking for can be a tall order.
Getting More Out of Your CRM
Despite their imperfections, sellers remain committed to using CRMs in the hope of solving a variety of problems. Specifically, they want a tool that:
- Offers greater functionality than they can otherwise achieve
- Serves as a centralized repository for information
- Is fast, easy to use, and flexible
- Integrates well with other software
- Isn’t old, outdated, or heavily customized
But to meet these and other objectives, sales teams are realizing that they need to enhance and augment their existing CRM with a variety of other software. That’s particularly true if they want to adopt a more customer-centric approach to selling. While the most commonly used tools are familiar, such as Outlook, Excel, Gmail, and Marketo, sellers rely on plenty of other, less well-known applications, too. In fact, according to a 2018 survey by SelectHub, there are approximately 500 different tools that sales teams regularly utilize, the majority of which aren’t CRMs or CRM-related solutions.
Supercharge Your CRM with Sales Enablement
In the report, Forrester goes on to explain that sales reps who use effectiveness tools are able to “prepare, refine, and deliver compelling value stories to their customers.” Take a sales enablement platform, for example.
When you combine your CRM with the right sales enablement tool, you can gain a variety of advantages that help your sellers improve their productivity and performance.
This integration That includes the ability to:
- Get inline, context-perfect content recommendations for your unique buyers at each stage of their journey. Importantly, the more you use such a tool, the better those recommendations will become.
- Produce personalized, relevant content in minutes with buyer and seller information and other relevant data automatically integrated into it. In that way, you can deliver final, customized content to buyers, right from your CRM.
- Save content straight to a folder contextually associated with any record in your CRM. You can even invite non-CRM users to collaborate. By doing so, everything stays clean and organized, and you always know exactly where to find in-progress content for any opportunity.
- Discover contextually relevant training for each record, and discover training content paired with predictive sales content recommendations and assets from your library.
By enhancing your CRM with a sales enablement tool, you can maximize its overall effectiveness and position your sales team for greater success.
The Bottom Line
A CRM is a powerful tool and one that’s critical to the success of any business. But that doesn’t mean that you’ll reap all of the benefits it can provide right out of the box. To get the best results, you need to augment your existing CRM system to increase its overall effectiveness and maximize your return on investment. With so many tools on the market to choose from, you need to be careful to select ones that are going to drive the greatest value. As we’ve seen, enhancing your CRM with a sales enablement tool is a great way to do just that by making your sales reps lives easier so that they can focus their energy where it matters most.
Want to learn more about the value your organization will gain by enhancing your CRM with a sales enablement platform, and how doing so will increase CRM adoption? Join us on October 24 at 2 pm ET for a webinar featuring guest speakers Kate Leggett (Forrester), Juliana Hickey (PowerObjects), and our Shaalin Parekh and Lauren Stefano. Register today.
