Sales calls, emails, meetings, proposals, presentations. That’s a sales person’s world. And to a large degree the secret 
to selling success is maximizing the quantity of calls and emails and proposals, etc. that you do. That’s what a CRM is supposed to do for sales people. CRM helps sales people remember to call the right customer at the right time. It helps them prepare proposals quickly. Some CRMs even help sales people send standardized emails to customers.
Sounds good but, we all know that you can’t just put an online CRM in front of your sales team and expect success. Getting sales people using the CRM consistently is the biggest challenge. But all of this firepower is focused solely at customers currently in the sales person’s pipeline of deals to close. If you’re close rate is a robust 30%, then 70% of your leads and prospects are just getting left behind for the most part. What if your CRM sent email automatically to the 70% of your prospects that didn’t buy the first time?
CRM with Email – What Works and What Does NOT
CRM with email that’s automatic is easy for sales people. Imagine that when the sales person decides to stop pursuing a lead, they just change a status value, say from Prospect to Suspect, and a completely automated email campaign starts nurturing the prospect automatically. The ROI on this kind of automated email CRM approach can be tremendous. The reason is that so few of your competitors are doing it. Here are some facts about CRM email:
- Most sales people talk to many prospects and close deals with less than 50% of them.
- Most sales people focus their time on prospects they’re current closing and put off follow up calls to “cold” leads.
- Most prospects that don’t make a purchase do not select a competing product; they just choose to do nothing for the time being.
- For these reasons, your CRM email nurturing campaign does not to need to be the most brilliant email campaign ever created. It just needs to keep your name in front of the prospect.
- They will call you when they are ready because you’ve been staying in touch with them via CRM emails.
Here’s what doesn’t work in CRM with Email!
Most CRM solutions have available integration with separate email marketing solutions. So, the sales people work their prospects in the CRM and then periodically, the marketing team mines the CRM for “cold” leads to add to their email marketing campaigns. If your sales people aren’t the best at keeping the CRM up to date, then many of their leads will be missed in this process or it will require a lot of research by the marketing team to find them. Either way, it won’t be consistent. Also, the sales person has built a relationship with the prospect. We want to maintain that. We want the emails from the CRM to appear to have come from the sales person and we want the sales person to get the reply or call when they’re ready to buy! Finally, most email marketing solutions include escalating prices based on the number of emails in the list and emails sent. This discourages use of the long haul in this way and causes costs to grow over time. Online CRMs like SalesNexus.com offer email marketing that’s automatic and can be activated by the sales person. SalesNexus.com CRM emails are also unlimited. Your costs don’t change no matter how many emails you’re sending. This makes it easy and affordable.