CRM for sales teams: How different sales roles use CRM

Best Practices

by   INSIGHTLY TEAM February 23, 2023

Customer relationship management software (CRM) offers a way to collect customer and lead data and present it in an accessible way to sales teams. The best CRM for sales teams will provide a holistic view of customers and leads, making it easier for those on your sales team to create personalized customer journeys for each one. So, what are CRM tools used for? The best CRMs for business help you gather customer interactions and data across all channels and organize them in one place. Having access to this centralized data allows businesses to enhance customer satisfaction, boost retention rates, and provide an improved customer experience. 

CRM Software

Insightly’s CRM software uses sales automation to help your sales team boost productivity —and profits. Sales CRM software takes over the admin work from your sales team, freeing them up from the manual processes of data entry and the like. This ensures that each member of your team has more time to focus on selling your products or services. 

CRM software typically gets data input from sources such as website forms, emails, and texts, as well as meetings with sales and customer service reps. These team members can gain valuable insights from that data. 

Sales Roles and CRM

Let’s take a closer look at the different ways that each member of a sales team can put the best CRM tools to work in this review of CRM for sales teams.

How a salesperson uses CRM

A salesperson can rely on a CRM for day-to-day usage. This includes tasks like entering and progressing opps, writing notes attached to customer interactions and events, and sending emails. 

How a sales manager uses CRM

Sales managers also rely on CRM software for daily use. This might include monitoring your reps’ progress and deals over time. Managers will route incoming leads (or set up CRM automations to do so.) Managers may also monitor CRM usage to ensure that reps are logging all of their interactions appropriately to keep the single source of truth of the business. 

How a Sales Leader and Chief Sales Officer uses CRM

Team members in these roles will likely use CRM on a weekly basis to review more comprehensive dashboards, reports, and trends. They’ll use CRM data to forecast for the coming month, quarter or 1-2 quarters beyond. 

How a SDR/BDR/MDR uses CRM

These roles use CRMs daily for tasks like working leads, sending emails, and looking up phone numbers. These roles will receive leads that they have been assigned by their manager in the CRM and update the lead records as they go through their lead qualification process.

How a Sales Enablement Manager uses CRM

These sales managers will use the date in the CRM to help improve processes on the sales team. For instance, they can use a CRM weekly to look for stalled opportunities and friction points and work on developing new training programs or assets to help the sales team address them. 

Sales CRM

CRMs are mostly designed for sales and marketing teams, but they do plenty of other things too. Whether you’re interested in the best CRM for a service-based business or the best CRM for a one-man business, they can help you manage and improve relationships between team members, customers, vendors, partners, collaborators, and more. 

A sales CRM gathers personal data from contacts and then compiles and organizes it into a 360-degree view of your customers and leads. Sales teams can use this info to offer a more personalized customer journey to increase sales and improve customer relationships. Automation of design, distribution, and tracking for an email campaign are just a few CRM marketing examples that show how the software frees up your sales team to focus on tasks that only humans can handle. 

CRM Tools

CRM tools for marketing and sales help improve how your business functions in these areas. There are CRM tools for customer service as well. The purpose of different types of CRM tools is to organize and record customer data in a way that streamlines business processes and helps track customers throughout their journey. Ideally, these tools help move customers through the different stages of the buying journey. 

CRM Tools Examples

This CRM tools list can help give you a sense of what specific CRM tools can do when they are used either independently or in conjunction with one another. 

CRM Tools for Marketing

While  there are some CRM tools for marketing that can help sales people send small batches of emails and follow-up on leads, most of the marketing functions are housed in a different application referred to as a marketing automation platform. Marketing automation platforms can help you find high-quality leads and do a more effective job of nurturing them. The purpose of these tools is to automate a variety of time-consuming marketing processes, including event management, email campaigns, and paid ads. They also make it possible for members of your organization to stay aligned on overall business objectives and strategies.

When paired with CRM tools for sales, a marketing automation platform updates shared data automatically. This helps ensure that everyone in the organization is working with the most up-to-date data, which results in more effective collaboration, increased conversion rates, and improved customer satisfaction. 

Marketing automation platforms can manage everything from basic capabilities, like blasting out email marketing campaigns, to more advanced processes, like:

• Multichannel campaigns
• Personalization
• Event planning
• Insights into campaign performance and ROI

Many CRMs, including Insightly, have platforms for marketing automation. 

CRM Tools for Sales

Sales teams use CRM tools to gather reports and analytics to offer a holistic view of demographics, engagement, purchase history, and more. CRM tools for sales can work together with CRM tools for marketing to adjust different elements of the customer journey based on which strategies are actually driving sales. These tools offer added visibility into the customer experience and help gather and organize real-time data for both sales and marketing teams to use. 

CRM tools for sales begin by compiling massive amounts of customer data, which they can then break down into real-time insights, trend tracking, performance insights, task automation, increased visibility into the sales pipeline, and more. 

CRM Tools for Customer Service

While CRMs have some features for managing customers, a dedicated customer service platform is the ideal place to house this type of data. Customer service platforms allow teams to record tickets, provide a knowledge base, and track issue resolution customers across multiple channels. These tools make customer interactions easier and trackable, and automatically record them to create a big-picture view of each customer. This makes it easier to provide higher-quality, personalized customer service. 

Many CRMs, including Insightly, have platforms for customer service.

By combining marketing, sales, and customer service tools in one, organizations can track customer journeys and seek ways to improve them. They can also use insights from AI and machine learning to enhance customer experiences, increase productivity, and make their go-to-market teams more effective. 

What Is CRM Software Used For

CRM for sales and marketing can help your organization build and nurture relationships with your customers. A good CRM marketing strategy can bolster your business and help drive bottom-line ROI. 

But what is CRM software used for on a practical level? Let’s take a closer look at some of the concrete ways that CRM software can benefit your business. 

Data Centralization

The best CRM for business development, marketing, and sales gathers essential information about your customers, your sales pipeline, and the performance of your team members and makes it easy for anyone at your organization to access. Having a centralized database means that your team members can align on larger objectives and ownership of specific metrics. Alignment within the company helps increase efficiency and reduce the chances of important data getting lost or not being put to use. 

Organizing Data

CRM helps keep data in one central location and also organizes the data to make it easy to find the information you need, when you need it. Gathering your data in an organized fashion like this helps you leverage the information in myriad new ways. A data-driven sales team can reach new heights by implementing replicable sales processes that consistently yield higher returns over time. 

Increased Productivity

When data is stored in one central location and organized in a globalized fashion, team members save money seeking out the answers they are trying to find. This increased productivity saves time and money, improving the overall operations of your organization. Allowing your sales team to work more productively can also have a significant  impact on overall ROI. 

Improved Customer Service

CRM software records and organizes massive amounts of data that might otherwise go to waste. The tools available via CRM make it possible to see a comprehensive view of each of your customer’s interactions with your company. Team members can use this information to shape unique, personalized journeys for each customer. In addition to moving more customers through the sales funnel, your business can also use this data to provide exceptional levels of customer service. 

Increased Sales

With all of your data in one accessible location, your sales and marketing team can easily collaborate and rest assured that they are working with the same real-time data. CRM software allows users to glean highly valuable insights from this data, which can help team members boost sales. Plus, your team will have more time to devote to improving big-picture sales strategies instead of losing time to repetitive, mundane tasks. 

Improved Scalability

Compiling all of your data in one centralized location and automating many of your customer interactions means that your team can expand without all the hiccups involved in manual processes. Having a system in place that allows for scalability is one of the best ways to ensure a company’s ability to increase revenue over time. 

In today’s business landscape, finding a way to manage customer data is an absolute necessity. Whether you are a small business with 10 customers or a giant corporation with tens of thousands, you need an effective way to store customer information, transaction histories, record interactions, and more. A CRM for your sales team helps keep all the data you need at your fingertips, making it easy for you to provide a better overall experience for your customers and maintain those relationships over time.

Choose Insightly CRM for your sales team

Insightly CRM is the ideal solution for all of the roles on your sales team. It’s a powerful, feature-rich CRM. Plus, it aligns your teams by allowing sales, marketing, and customer service to work in the same platform. 

Get started with a free trial of Insightly CRM today, or a personalized demo to see how Insightly can help your company achieve its business goals.