In layman’s terms, sales enablement is the process of giving your sales and customer support teams the resources necessary to close more deals. Those resources might include training, marketing, sales collateral; tools; and technology.
One often-overlooked resource for sales enablement is your communication system. Choosing a business communication system that integrates with your CRM is a great way to support your sales enablement strategy.
Why Prioritize Sales Enablement?
The “old-school” sales method, outbound calls, is no longer enough in today’s consumer environment. Prospects and customers expect a more personalized approach, where they “opt-in” to receive your sales messages through the channels of their choice. This can make it more challenging than ever to track the customer journey.
Focusing on sales enablement can help ensure that your team has the right tools for this job, so they can close more deals and better predict their results and add more value for customers. Sales enablement isn’t a one-time exercise; it’s an ongoing, iterative collaborative effort across the organization.
It may sound complicated or overwhelming, but a comprehensive sales enablement strategy offers multiple vital benefits:
- Better alignment and communication between marketing, sales, and customer service
- Less time and effort are required to administer the sales process
- More opportunities for up-selling and cross-selling
- Reduced time spent on training new sales employees
- More informed interactions with prospects and customers
Your customer relationship management (CRM) software plays a crucial role in your sales enablement strategy because it provides a unified location for all your essential sales-related data, which usually includes the following:
- Prospects’ and customers’ contact information
- Prospect company industry, size, and location
- Interactions with the sales team or other employees in your organization
- Stage in the sales cycle
- Any supplemental information that might be relevant to closing the sale and delivering customer support afterward
Benefits of Integrating Your CRM with VoIP
CRM platforms are vital for businesses to keep track of their interactions with prospects and customers. Most companies already integrate their CRM with their email system to ensure that these electronic interactions are captured in a prospect’s record for future reference.
But what about other interactions, such as phone calls? It’s vital to capture details from these communications in the CRM. This is where integrating your CRM with your VoIP system offers several significant advantages.
#1. Better Customer Experience and Efficiency
Your CRM can help anticipate customer needs before agents even speak with the customer on the other line. The incoming caller typically has a CRM profile, including information like the number of times they have visited an organization’s website, what items have been viewed, and past purchases to better assess the context of the call and be more helpful.
This software saves an agent and the customer so much time by intaking the customer’s contact information and contextual information before agent contact. CRM is already improving efficiency because many data collecting, analytics, and other platforms work together. There is no need to run tons of platforms together manually; one app can do it for you. Agents can also see a customer’s contact history with the corporation and view previous troubleshooting/support tickets. This, in turn, leads to shorter exchanges, shorter wait times, and better customer satisfaction rates.
#2. Improved Management
VoIP CRM tools provide:
- Managers with crucial analytics for individual agents
- The amount of calls they take in a day
- Caller hang-ups
- The average call time
- The average wait time
Managers can use this data to make improvements, train more efficiently and effectively, and improve the team as a whole. If one agent spends more than average time on one customer, the manager can swiftly assign more agents to incoming calls. They can also view timestamps, see consistently less busy times, and reduce the number of agents during the timeframe.
#3. Real-time Call Logging
Each interaction with a customer should be treated with the highest level of professionalism. There is no longer a need to enter data regarding calls manually. VoIP and CRM integrations take care of all the logging live. Sometimes cloud-based VoIP solutions can even record and transcribe specific aspects of a call for future use.
CRM integrations can also note detailed information such as whether the call came from a mobile phone or landline, whether the call was an Internet voice or video call, and what time of day the call was received. All of this information is able to be utilized to improve the customer experience.
#4. Closed-loop Analytics
CRM data is crucial for sales and marketing teams to analyze customer behavior, craft marketing personas, and build campaign strategies. This helps get to know your customers’ needs and improve the chances of closing the sale. “Closed-loop analytics” refers to the process of sharing data that closes the loop between the marketing and sales departments. This is implemented to drive revenue and conversion rates. Allowing the marketing team to access the business’s phones can determine which tactics drive sales or derail them. The goal is to increase customer satisfaction overall.
SimplicityLink provides a standard level of integration with many popular CRM systems that will allow you to get the most out of your hosted business VoIP system. SimplicityLink allows users to work collaboratively, collectively, and efficiently. Gathering information from callers is easier than ever, cost-effective for businesses, and easy to install and maintain while offering all of the tools your business needs to improve customer satisfaction.
Real-world Perspective: Nationwide VoIP Deployment with Salesforce Integration
Simplicity has revolutionized communication efforts within the United States’ vocational education consortium, which comprises the Aviation Institute of Maintenance, Centura College, and Tidewater Tech. The consortium has 20 locations nationwide, with more than 300 employees working in campus-staff roles.
Before partnering with Simplicity, internal operations were stuck in an old-fashioned way of doing things (like using a paper-based system and a copper-based phone system). The group used around 30 different tools to keep track of its admissions success and student information.
Modern technologies were not being utilized to their full potential; no advanced voice communications were being implemented, there was a heavy dependency on legacy systems, no customer relationship management (CRM) system was in place, and there was no way to log, analyze, and optimize the admissions staff’s interactions with current, former and prospective students (or even prospective employees).
That all changed with the help and integration of Simplicity VoIP.
Simplicity VoIP teamed up with Salesforce.com, and their collaborative platform was introduced in January 2020. This integration was “almost flawless” and was a gamechanger for the school’s admission process and customer service aspirations. Simplicity VoIP can use various software records programs, so there is no need to switch between platforms like they were doing before.
Simplicity also performs automatic data capture, logging, and reporting on calling activity via the CTI; the system records relevant data points from a specific conversation and packages them into data logs for the leadership team across the network. The records show how many inbound and outbound calls a representative has handled, call duration, and whether someone was connected on the other end, among additional information.
Calls are more efficient and customer-oriented than ever. Now, schools take advantage of all the benefits VoIP offers to serve students better, support staff, and increase enrollment. Simplicity even offers mobile functionality integrated with Salesforce.com’s CRM platform.
Check out the complete (and downloadable) case study below!
