Purchasing Resources for Sales Software

Business Guide to Sales Software

Sales software can benefit your business by helping you and your salesmen to increase sales, which will ultimately increase your company’s revenue. It will not only help you to improve the methods you use to generate revenue, it will also help you to incorporate new ideas and methods into your current sales strategies. Sales software is also customizable, and you can adjust the software’s default settings to cater to the specific needs of your business. You can also use this software to monitor the trends occurring within your industry. CRM and sales software can greatly benefit your business in many ways.

Benefits

Purchasing the right CRM and sales software can help your business increase profits and better serve your clients. According to SmallBizCRM, 42 percent of licenses for CRM software purchased in 2002 were unused. The site also notes that up to 85 percent of companies who buy sales software don't choose the right package because they don't define their objectives and how to meet them. For this reason, it is important to grasp potential benefits and compare them to future goals to avoid a useless purchase.

Increases profits

One large benefit of CRM software is its ability to show forecasts for future sales as well as past sales data. This allows the sales team and management to make intelligent decisions when enacting cost-cutting measures, ordering inventory, and determining discount offers. These decisions should lead to greater profits and less waste for your business.

Organizes sales leads

If you have a large sales team, CRM software will allow you to quickly identify future leads on potential customers without overlapping your efforts. The software can allow you to quickly divide these leads into territories, so each team member knows which leads he should investigate. Once a potential customer becomes a client, the sales software will quickly remove them from the list of leads, preventing redundant recruiting calls.

Improves customer service

While one member of a sales team may help a specific client, anyone with access to the sales software can view pertinent information about that customer. With access to this information, other team members can help that client if their regular account manager is unavailable. Access to the CRM software also allows receptionists and other intermediaries to quickly interpret probable concerns in order to forward a client to the appropriate manager.

Increases targeted marketing and up-selling opportunities

Using CRM software will allow you to target existing customers who may want to purchase additional services. This software also allows customer service representatives and other employees outside of the sales team to up-sell to the customer if the opportunity presents itself. You can also view customer details such as existing orders, payment history, and current accounts to create an enticing offer for your client.

Pitfalls

Upfront Investment of Resources

The benefits to implementing a new sales software approach around a CRM database are often very clear, but there are also significant pitfalls to consider before you change your company's sales system. Changing your company's technology base for key operational tasks requires a significant upfront investment of time and resources that is usually not detailed by the software company that is trying to make a sale. Your business may need to update its hardware to run the new software. Your existing sales data will likely need to be properly prepared for integration with the new system. Your employees will often require training. Most importantly, you will have to invest time and resources to ensure that the change does not detrimentally impact customers.

Use of Proprietary Databases

One of the key concerns in using CRM and sales software is that the systems are based on proprietary databases. Companies design the software and only license it to you. Once you have integrated your sales system with a particular software package, you are literally locked into a relationship with the software designer. There is only a single source of upgrades, support, or customization of the system. If you like the software but dislike the software developer's customer support, there is not much you can do without absorbing a significant business loss to make another software change.

Limited Customization

Another potential pitfall in using CRM and sales software is the structure of the system. It is often difficult to determine upfront if a software platform can do everything you will need it to do in the future. Often, business needs change over time, and proprietary systems sometimes cannot be customized to change with your company's needs. Depending on the rate of change, you can find that you made a substantial investment in sales software today that is functionally obsolete tomorrow.

Ongoing Charges

A major area of concern in implementing CRM and sales software is the ongoing costs that software developers often charge when they license their programs. These charges can include annual fees for licensing and technical support and periodic fees for training and upgrading the software. These fees are in addition to the original upfront costs to obtain and install the software. If you do not plan for these ongoing costs when you make the initial purchase decision, you can find that the sales software is a budgetary drain that impacts your company's profit margins.

Pricing

The immediate cost of implementing CRM and sales software is the licensing fee. This sales software expense varies depending on the size of your company, the application itself, and the amount of users that you would like to be able to access the software. According to CRMlandmark.com you should expect the licensing fees to run from as little as $200 to as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars. These fees are most often annual and must be paid for the life of the software.

Web-based, hosted CRM sales software offers subscription costs around $65 per month per user. This type of solution requires no IT personnel to man and very little IT infrastructure to run and maintain.

CRM return on investment varies with the quality of the software and, more importantly, the amount of time that a business spends using it. Studies conducted by the Gartner Group suggest that as much as 42 percent of CRM software licenses are unused, resulting in an annual waste of more than one billion dollars. A study conducted by the IDC, however, found that companies that successfully implement CRM solutions see returns of at least 16 percent to as much as 1,000 percent.

As a salesman, it is important to take advantage of as many sales resources as possible. This not only helps you to streamline the process of running your sales operation, it also helps you to grow within the sales industry. Sales software is very easy to install and use, and it does not require a lot of memory to run efficiently on a standard computer. You’ll be able to use your software to share important statistics with your business partners, and you can use it to share data with your clients. If you want to increase your sales, productivity and profits, research the many sales software programs on the market, and choose one that would best suit your business’s needs.