Sales funnel in the CRM-system
In any industry business processes can be divided into several groups. These are a group of processes of sales and work with the client, a group of processes of providing the flow of clients, a group of processes of value production and a group of providing internal processes.
In a group of processes of work with clients business processes between different organizations do not differ much. That’s why template CRM systems that allow you to lead the customer through the sales funnel are so widespread. The sales funnel is one of the main components of a CRM system. What is the funnel – in fact it is just a stage of the order. CRM systems display analytics based on the log of the order movement through the sales funnel. You can not go into all the details, but just order Saas application development company.
What is a sales funnel
This is the division of customer enquiries into consecutive statuses from the first customer contact with the organization to the conclusion of a deal. The sales funnel can have different visual representations. Its main purpose is to improve the quality of the sales department by analyzing the data, identifying “dumping” of orders at different stages from the funnel, identifying the causes of this “dumping” and eliminating these causes. This process is called funnel expansion.
Why is it called a funnel?
Because visually the number of appeals at each stage, those appeals that go on, with the advancement decreases. If you write the number of appeals at certain stages one under another, and visually represent this as the width of the line, you get a view of the funnel.
Build a sales funnel
In order to build a sales funnel, you don’t need a CRM system. You just need a CRM. It’s the process of managing the relationship between an organization and its customers. You can build a sales funnel on a piece of paper. It’s enough to have all the data you need to do it. A CRM system is an automation system that allows you to automate this process and make it more convenient.
A very common misconception is that we will have a CRM system and sales will start. No, this is not true. Building a sales funnel and its analysis is primarily an organizational process. Building a sales funnel is:
- Recording all types of appeals from all sources.
- Separation of the process of working with the client from contacting the company to the implementation of the order, creating a consistent business process.
- Distribution of appeals by statuses in accordance with the consistent logic of the business process.
How does the funnel expand?
After building a sales funnel and maintaining it for some time, there is data for analysis. It is revealed at which stage of the funnel the most customers are rejected. The number of requests transferred from one stage to another is usually counted as a percentage. For example, an analysis of the funnel shows that 70% of customers refuse after receiving a commercial offer. Thus, it is necessary to identify why, what does not suit in the commercial proposal, and work towards solving the identified problem. The essence of dividing into statuses – decomposition of the process, which can get an answer to the question: “Why do we have 100 calls, but only 2 orders?
Automation of the funnel in the CRM-system
First of all, it is necessary to organize the process by which all appeals will get into the information system. In this case, to hope that managers will enter everything there is to bury the idea of implementing a CRM-system at an early stage. There will always be those who believe that this call or letter is unlikely to lead to an order and will not take the time to enter information. This process needs to be automated. This is done by connecting the telephony system and connecting it to the corporate mail where applications come in. And then each call or letter will create an appeal, with which you have to do something, you just can’t delete it. You can delete it reasonably, but this appeal and its deletion will be recorded. Yes, in this case in the CRM-system gets a lot of spam, but about this problem and its solution we will tell next.
Requests that get in this way in the CRM-system will be taken into account and fall into the statistics. Next is simple, the distribution to managers (each organization does this process in its own way) and the movement of this transaction through the funnel.
For sale only
In the sales funnel, the CRM system classically captures and maintains orders only up to the transaction stage. However, the CRM system is often used for subsequent order management, up to the shipment of the order or project execution. This is normal practice and a logical continuation of the request, turned into a contract. Another thing is that CRM-systems (conventional) are not designed for this. This is the fulfillment of another block of processes mentioned at the beginning of the article. The attempt to interact with accounting, to confirm the cost of the order with the management, to pass the order to the colleagues by exchanging information via comments on the order – is an attempt to put a system on top of processes that are larger than it. That is, to turn a CRM system into an XRM or ERP system. To solve these problems it is necessary to make an individual CRM-system with the possibility of later extending its functionality to other business processes of the organization.
Spam messages
There is a basic rule – that all appeals (calls, letters) go into the system. However, as a rule, there are a lot of incoming cold calls and spam emails that have no effect on efficiency. It is possible to classify it all correctly in the statistics, but it is more convenient to put the top level of the funnel in a separate block of classification of appeals. This will allow to correctly classify the funnel at the early stages of appeals. This is more convenient to work with than when there are hundreds of cards in the left column of the initial appeals, and 2-3 in the next one. It is more convenient to have a separate section of the information system responsible for classification of appeals in order to be able to put into the funnel only potentially interested in the transaction clients. These and many other changes are possible when developing an individual CRM-system and are not available when using template systems.