How to Use Your CRM as a Sales Training Tool
In sales, there’s often a gap between having technology and using technology to its potential.
Businesses know they need to train their salespeople. They also know they need a customer relationship management (CRM) tool. But few know how to bridge the gap between those two concepts: to connect training to the CRM.
A CRM, though, could be the most powerful sales training tool in your toolbox. You can leverage the technology not just to make a sales team more efficient, but to make a sales team’s training more efficient, too.
With the right sales training approach, sales leaders can leverage their CRM to not only build better customer relationships, but to build better sales teams, too.
How a CRM can Build a BRIDGE to Success
In the world of sales performance management, there is a wide variety of sales skills that a sales rep needs in order to reach key performance indicators, connect with prospective customers, and land deals.
You can find a smorgasbord of frameworks. One of the best ones we’ve come across, however, is from our partners at Pangea Performance Consulting Group, called BRIDGE.
According to BRIDGE, to improve a sales organization the most, the following skills need to be taught and mastered:
Business Planning
Relationship Building
Investigating Needs
Delivering Solutions
Getting Past Objections
Expecting Obstacles
Learning how to navigate sales cycles and customer journeys in a CRM can reinforce many of those concepts, but there are two in particular that stand out: Business Planning and Relationship Building.
Learning How to Plan a Key Account Management Strategy
Business Planning, according to Pangea, is all about the fundamentals of your organization’s sales strategy and how you’ll execute it.
The goal here is to understand the essentials of your customer, particularly in your key accounts. You want to pull in, organize, and analyze data from all sorts of places, so a more complete picture of your potential customers emerges.
Only by understanding the customer journey can a sales rep start laying out a plan of attack. That will include finding key stakeholders; identifying gaps in products/services where you can fill a need; digesting financial data that gives insight about the company’s performance, and uncovering anything else that will give a rep that critical insider knowledge they need to breakthrough.
Of course, that’s exactly what a CRM as a sales training tool is designed to do. But, companies often don’t make the connection between key account planning as a strategic concept and the specific tasks reps perform in the CRM to execute it.
There’s a persistent gap – and only by aligning your tech with your training can you bridge it.
Finding and Building Better Customer Relationships
Strategies run on people power. Without the right relationships, even the best sales strategies will come up empty.
Consultative selling is based on the principle that if you don’t talk to the right people – and get them to trust you – they won’t buy. No goals can be achieved in a vacuum; other people are required, and they are often hard to find, hard to reach, and hard to persuade.
If you build a meaningful relationship with prospects, though – one built on mutual trust and credibility – the sky’s the limit.
A CRM (especially one equipped with relationship mapping capabilities) is a perfect platform to teach reps a hands-on way to:
1. Find the right key stakeholders
2. Figure out what’s important to them
3. Fit the approach to their specific personality type
A sales training tool or program that doesn’t teach these vital concepts behind customer communication won’t compete.
Using a CRM’s inherent contact management abilities – coupled with better ways to highlight pathways of influence and inform buyer’s groups within a target account – is the proven way to develop profitable business relationships.
Turn Your Sales Tech Into a Sales Training Tool – One Powerful Process
Sales tech is great, as is sales training. However, both need each other if a sales organization is going to be as productive as possible.
That’s why Prolifiq is partnering with Pangea: to marry data, analytics, CRM, sales process, sales management, and sales training into one integrated process. The end goal? Aligning stakeholders and enabling sales professionals to sell more effectively.
Align scalable, best-in-class tech with proven concepts like the BRIDGE sales training framework and you’ll give your sales teams a major edge: the ability to go to market with a competitive advantage.
To learn more about using Prolifiq inside of Salesforce as a sales training tool with Pangea, check out this video!
Want to combine Prolifiq’s capabilities with Pangea’s training? Contact Steve Northey at steven.northey@prolifiq.ai or Phil Shaffalo at phil.shaffalo@gmail.com.