Top 3 CRM for Tracking Sales Pipeline
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Sales pipeline management is a crucial tool for any salesperson. The use of pipeline management software can help you to manage activities at key stages of your business process, provide feedback on its efficacy and keep your organisation focused on achieving its goals.
The sales pipeline is an approach to selling, based on the structure of the sales process. It consists of a series of steps that salespeople undertake, from initial contact with a prospect, to converting them into a lead, validating the lead into a feasible sales opportunity, and every step towards closing the lead. The sales pipeline represents the sales opportunities arranged along each of the steps in your sales process. This methodology is pretty well-known, but many businesses aren’t using it to improve their sales.
Once the process steps are decided on, the IT department need to be made aware of them so that the steps can be automated. Automation needs to accurately reflect your business processes, otherwise your whole team will struggle to adapt.
Some CRM systems are not designed with enough flexibility to deal with your agreed-upon pipeline management steps. It may be tempting to customise your existing ERP, but in the long term this will cost you much more than a new, adequately flexible CRM in terms of wasted sales, executive and IT time and resources. It is recommended in this case to choose CRM software specifically suited to sales pipeline management.
The most important use of pipeline CRM is by your on-the-ground sales force. Salespeople don’t want to be wasting too much time for the information they need. Automation can record important data in its correct place so that it can later be accessed and used to secure sales.
Good automation software also ought to assist a salesperson in analysing the pipeline to determine whether or not targets are being met. Sales management need to be able to view the pipeline activity of each of their reps, as well as their whole department, for a comprehensive view of processes. The system should also be able to accurately forecast sales. Analysis and forecasting is only useful if pipeline management is accurately represented by automation. The CRM tool should also be able to be used for creating reports and analyses.
What is the best CRM for tracking sales pipeline?
Zoho CRM is an excellent system for pipeline management if you’re looking for a cost-effective solution with all the essential functionality your business requires. The system can be free for up to ten users, unlike most CRMs, which usually only allow a few users for free.
Another benefit Zoho has above other free CRMs is that its functionality is much more advanced for freeware, with features such as lead gathering, contact management, workflow automation, analytics, social collaboration and a robust set of tools to manage and report your sales pipeline.
Like its paid version, the free Zoho stores and displays all of the vital information you need to make informed decisions. You have access to a 360° view of contacts, sales cycles and pipelines, making it easier to tend to customers and identify trends and source opportunities.
It integrates effortlessly with a variety of third-party applications and services so that your CRM data can be used by the rest of your business processes. Zoho integrates with Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Tasks, which allows data, events and tasks to be exported into these apps, and data such as Gmail messages can be imported into your CRM software.
Though Zoho has a strong sales pipeline, it does not offer much in the way of sales management. However, there are many solutions that can track the process of onboarding a customer after a deal has been closed, as well as provide pipeline management. RevampCRM is a popular sales and marketing CRM system especially tailored for small business and etailers. You can dynamically segment leads, outline continuous integration workflows, and manage email campaigns. A huge variety of tasks can be automated, including reminders, follow-up emails, lead score and task creation. Its automation engine can send relevant messages at appropriate times in order to cultivate leads. RevampCRM provides pre-built campaigns and workflows to save time, and would be especially useful for a new business with little experience in designing campaigns and workflows.
Its visual sales pipeline and reports provide a clear overview of your deals, and is designed intuitively, making it easier to track deal activities and tasks, and even assign deals and add and edit tasks. Each pipeline stage can be customised to suit your organisation’s specific requirements. Your notifications can be customised as well so that you don’t have to search your data for insights, but instead receive the notifications you need to grow your business and optimise your sales process.
Pipeliner’s strength is its visual nature in comparison with other CRM’s, which offers better transparency and visibility into the sales pipeline. It’s also remarkably flexible, and can suit an organisation of any size in virtually any industry. Pipeliner is web-based and compatible with both Windows and Mac, and provides apps for iPhones, iPads and Android devices. The fact that it’s based in the Cloud means that it can be used from anywhere, even without an internet connection; it also works offline both on the desktop and mobile applications. These apps let you see multiple opportunities across pipelines, and are designed to give you online access.
Its dashboard displays all the information you need to optimise your processes, such as contact management and lead generation and tracking. The automation it offers removes the need for needlessly tedious and slow data entry.
Pipeliner integrates with popular third-party products such as Box, Dropbox, OneDrive for Business, GoToWebinar, FreshBooks, Zendesk, Shopify and Constant Contact. It also offers DBX for Pipeliner CRM, which allows you to connect any SQL, SQLite, or ODBC-compliant database to the application.
