How to Choose the Best Sales Management Software | Ringy

Taking the step into sales management can be a challenging transition.

You've spent years honing your skills as a sales rep, and though your success has got you this far, you're quickly realizing that the sales manager role is a whole other ball game.

Aside from keeping your team motivated, accountable, and productive, you're also responsible for your entire team's sales quota.

Source

Your leadership skills are going to be put to the test, sure, but you're not without a secret weapon to help you to smash it out of the park.

Psst. It's called sales management software. Keep the secret to yourself, will ya?

In this article, we're going to show you exactly how sales management software gives you the power to step up to the plate and win.

Of course, there is a tonne of solutions out there claiming to be the be-all and end-all of sales team software platforms! So, we'll dive deep into the key features of a high-performing tool so you can choose the right solution for your team.

Batter up!

What is Sales Management Software?

Before we take you to the big leagues, let's start with a nice gentle underarm pitch, and break down the basics of sales management software.

This handy piece of tech goes by a few names (sales CRM, sales contact software, sales management system, etc), and it serves the primary purpose of improving your ability to grow sales revenue.

Sales management software achieves this goal by:

1. Simplifying your sales process
2. Keeping track of all customer interactions
3. Providing in-depth and up-to-date reporting and analytics
4. Automating routine administrative tasks
5. Integrating with other tools in your sales stack

Sounds good, right? But how do agents and sales leaders actually use sales management software?

Despite modern sales team software platforms often being uncomfortably complex, most reps find themselves gravitating to one of three main facets.

Sales Pipeline

The sales pipeline is the primary view for most sales reps. It's your home base.

Ringy's sales pipeline is a stage platform where you can categorize the leads in your system through a variety of filtrations we have preset in our system, it can also categorize by time frame from when the lead came in.

This makes it so you can set up your calling based on filters you set for that stage instead of just clicking to dial each lead individually. Once you set up your "stage" aka a bucket, you can efficiently dial through the selected stage seamlessly, and the calls will begin. Once you hit "start dialing", our system will automatically call the leads in that specific stage for you. Once the call ends or the voicemail has been left, it hangs up and moves on to the next lead automatically for you.

Our sales pipeline is built for efficiency and organization so you spend less time manually dialing and searching for leads in your system.

Contact Management

This section of your sales management software platform is where all of your customer contact information is stored (also generally accessible from each specific deal).

Reps can search for customer contact information, and if they have a VoIP phone set up, click to call.

Reporting Dashboard

The reporting section of your system is where sales managers often spend a lot of their time.

Your sales management software should provide insights on the team and individual performance, sales results, conversion rates, and rep activity (such as the number of phone calls made or emails sent).

Sales Rep Management Software in a Nutshell

The main takeaway here is that sales management software allows teams to better manage their processes, resulting in a sales revenue increase of up to 41% per rep.

What is a Sales Management Process?

A sales management process is the exercise of managing sales operations, sales team members, and sales processes, and implementing new initiatives to help drive sales revenue.

Sales management process development can be broken down into 6 core areas:

1. A strategy for hiring, onboarding, and training new sales executives
2. Sales coaching initiatives
3. Sales process development
4. Revenue forecasting
5. Performance management
6. Measuring and reporting on sales results

Much of a manager's time here will be spent on sales rep management. New hires especially will require significant attention to ramp up to a point where they are achieving their targets, but even experienced agents appreciate ongoing coaching.

This can come in the form of:

• Sitting in on customer meetings
• Sales call management techniques such as call review sessions
• Role-play exercises
• Implementing sales training programs
• Peer-to-peer coaching

Sound like a lot to get your head around? Maybe.

Let's break it down.

Crash Course on Setting Up a Sales Management Process for your Business - 7 Steps

Developing a sales management process is not a one-and-done situation. You're going to spend a significant amount of time testing and tweaking it throughout your time as a sales manager.

However, it's always smart to put your best foot forward. You can kickstart your sales management process with these 7 steps.

1. Qualify leads

The first step in a strong sales process is to qualify your lead. In a nutshell, this means asking the prospect some very specific questions (or gathering the answer yourself through the likes of social media) to determine whether or not they are a fit for your company.

Why is this important?

Because nearly two-thirds of marketers send leads off to sales reps even though only 21% of them are actually qualified.

Shouldn't that be marketing's responsibility then?

Well, yes, to a degree. Both sales and marketing leaders need to work closely together to determine the specific criteria that dictate whether a lead is marketing qualified or not.

But in any case, before moving forward with your sales process it's wise to ensure that the lead is a good fit for you, so you don't waste any time.

Not all leads come from the marketing department either (we're talking about you, cold callers).

2. Learn the prospect's needs

It doesn't matter what you're selling. You can be pushing $100,000 software deals or dealing in singular reams of printer paper.

Either way, the key to your sales success breaks down into 3 abilities:

1. Understanding what your product does
2. Understanding the problems your prospect has
3. Understanding how to marry the two together

Let's put the product knowledge aspect to the side for now.

If you don't understand your prospect's true needs and challenges, you're never going to be able to convince them to buy your stuff, no matter how great you think it is.

We're talking about their actual challenges and needs here, not the ones you assume they have.

Here are a few examples of questions you can ask to uncover this information:

• What is the business problem you're looking to solve here?
• What has brought you to the decision to do something about it now?
• What are you doing to solve this issue right now? In what ways is this not working?

3. Address the problem

Gaining the trust of your prospects is a major hurdle for sales reps. As little as 3% of your buyers actually trust you to solve their problems.

So, how can you establish rapport and grow that trust element?

One way is to demonstrate that you understand the position that your prospect is in, using this framework:

"I totally understand how you feel [prospect name]. Many of our customers have also had [an emotional reaction] to [the problem], and what we've found is that by [solution you offer], we've been able to [fix that specific problem]."

Let's check out an example.

Imagine you're a mortgage broker. You're on the phone with a prospect, Mary, who has expressed how frustrated she is with her local bank, who've just denied her lending application.

Time to fill in the blanks:

Which sounds like:

"I totally understand how you feel, Mary. Many of our customers have also felt quite frustrated when they were denied a loan from their bank, and what we've found is that by having access to a wide variety of lenders that cater to specific customer needs, we're often able to get them approved for a loan so they can buy their dream home."

4. Present the solution

Once you've got the qualified customer on your side and determined how best your company can help, it's time to present your solution.

Remember here to tie your solution back to their initial problem.

How? By selling on value.

5. Sell value

Selling value essentially means that rather than focusing on the product you're offering specifically (and the costs involved to implement), you focus on the value that your product delivers.

If you sell insurance, for example, then rather than focusing on the cost of your policy, you'd put more effort into discussing how this will bring your customer peace of mind that in the event of an incident, they and their family will be covered.

6. Negotiate & close

Not all deals are going to close immediately after the presentation of your solution.

Often, and this is especially true of larger contacts, you're going to have to involve in a few rounds of negotiation with your client.

Let's look at a few tips for effective negotiation:

• Lead by opening the negotiation and putting the first offer on the table. This effectively anchors your price within a range you're willing to work with.
• Be prepared to concede something, to invoke the reciprocity principle
• Consider non-financial concessions (such as improving support access at the same price point)

7. Onboard efficiently

Consider this:

More than half of customers renege on a deal because they didn't understand how to use the product.

So, whether you're selling a physical product (like servers) or a subscription service (SaaS), make sure you've got a well-developed customer onboarding process.

Three bases to cover here are:

1. Effective handover to your customer success team
2. A post-sale follow-up procedure
3. Well-developed product documentation and feature-based content

Once you've got sales process management to a point where you're happy to put it into practice, it's time to look to the software gods for some guidance.

How is sales management software going to help you out here? Let's check it out.

How Will the Best Sales Management System Change Your Life?

We're not exaggerating when we say that sales management systems can totally transform your team performance.

Here's how:

Reduces admin work

40% of salespeople still use spreadsheets to manage customer data and sales processes.

That's a lot of time spent doing manual admin work.

Sales management software allows reps to get out of spreadsheet city and into a brave new world of automation.

Auto-what?

Automation is a core feature of sales management platforms, and it essentially involves telling your software to complete specific actions when triggered by a given event.

For example, sales automation can be used to send a templated email every time a prospect moves from your Pre-Qualification to Qualified stage, or to prompt a push notification to your sales reps to get their results into you at the end of each week.

Easy to use and set-up

Sales management platforms are (usually) pretty intuitive.

The best ones have strong onboarding processes that guide you through initial setups, and many of them can easily import data from spreadsheets or other platforms, so you can get in and get selling.

Unifies all tools

Sales, and inside sales, in particular, are characterized by a high degree of technological reliance.

An agent's tech stack generally consists of tools such as:

• Prospecting tools like LinkedIn
• Engagement tools like Zoom and Gmail
• Intelligence platforms like ZoomInfo
• Appointment and scheduling tools like Calendly
• Proposal tools like Proposify

A sales management software platform ties all of these separate entities together through native integrations.

These allow you to, for example, send an email from your sales management software interface, or pull data from your sales intelligence tool across to each lead without leaving the platform.

Available on the go

The best sales call management software providers are serious about mobile, offering intuitive apps for all platforms and all devices.

This has an immense impact on sales productivity, with mobile capability lifting sales results by up 26.4%.

Fully customizable

Though many of us adhere to a core methodology, the sales process of each team inevitably differs, at least to some degree.

As a result, it's important for sales management software to provide a level of customization to fit your needs.

When you make the switch, you'll notice a huge difference in the ability to customize both visual and technical aspects of your sales management systems, compared to using those (not-so) good old spreadsheets.

Increased ROI

All of this sounds just lovely, but what about the money?

A sales management CRM costs quite a lot, doesn't it?

Well, that's not really the case anymore (skip ahead to find out about the average costs of sales management software).

More important than the cash outlay, though, is the return on investment that these systems offer.

And, on average for every dollar you spend on a CRM, you get around 9 back.

Ask your stockbroker what he thinks about a 900% return.

9 Features That the Best Sales Management Software Offers

So, what's the best software for sales management?

Well, it depends a bit on your organization's needs. To help you figure that one out, let's look at 9 features of sales management software that we believe are vital to your organization's success.

1. Contact management

The primary job of any sales rep is to get in contact with leads, whether by:

• Phone
• Email
• SMS
• Video
• Social media

To empower your agents to perform their best, your sales management software should offer solutions for each of these contact methods, allowing you to keep all contact information in a single place and even click to call or send a message.

2. Customer & lead management

The game never ends for salespeople. Just as one prospect finally closes, ten more enter the sales pipeline, and it's back to the beginning of the process.

Sales management software should reflect this lead, integrating with your lead generation tools so new leads are automatically added to your sales pipeline.

In addition, the flexibility of pipeline design is key to the success of these tools, as it will allow you to fine-tune your system to accurately reflect your (often-changing) sales process.

3. Client interaction tracking

Remember that time when you went to call back a prospect and couldn't remember for the life of you where you landed in the last conversation?

It happens way more than it should, and it happens when salespeople don't carefully track their interactions.

Sales management software makes this easy to implement, allowing reps to take notes while on a call. Some of them even automatically transcribe calls for you.

Tracking communications activities accurately also gives you the ability to perform analysis on required sales activities to show you what might be helping or hindering your successes.

For example, you might identify that it takes an average of 7 calls to close a deal, or that your mornings are more productive for qualification calls than afternoons.

4. SMS marketing

SMS has been around for a while, but it's only really taking off in the world of sales in marketing now, as leaders realize that the email game is getting pretty crowded.

It has some pretty stunning results, too:

45% of potential clients would consider buying after receiving SMS.

Don't sell yourself short; choose a sales management software platform that makes for seamless SMS sends.

5. Sales automation

Hands up if you've ever thought to yourself: "If I could just spend more time each day actually selling, I'd destroy my sales targets."

As it turns out, you can.

As much as 45% of an agent's sales activities can be automated by embracing sales management software without effective sales automation functionality.

We'd highly recommend prioritizing automation as a feature when choosing sales management software, as it could allow your team to spend almost twice as much time each month actually selling.

6. Workflow management

Capable sales management systems include a high degree of workflow management.

This feature allows you to create pre-determined cadences (phone, email, SMS), and then put them into play in your sales platform.

This ensures consistency of process, but also reduces human error and keeps reps on track.

How?

Well, by fixing each new prospect to a specific workflow, with designated spaces in between activities (for example, call 2 occurring 4 days after call 1), your sales management system can automatically put together an activity list for each sales rep.

This means they can come into the office each day and be greeted with a full day's worth of sales activities, rather than having to spend the first hour or so of their day putting a plan together.

7. Mobile support

We've already discussed the crucial benefit offered by mobile app support (if you don't recall or you skipped ahead, the gist is that mobile apps make for more productive salespeople).

Don't expect, though, that just because a software provider offers an app, that it's any good.

Be sure to spend some time assessing the usability of these apps, and how they perform on different devices (such as a phone and a tablet).

8. Reporting and analytics

Perhaps the most important feature of sales management software from a leadership perspective is its ability to provide advanced reporting on sales performance.

Using these tools, you should be able to track and report on metrics such as:

• Customer churn rate
• Deal velocity
• Individual sales rep activity
• Average days to sale
• Performance against forecast or goal

These metrics inform changes to sales processes and help you to identify areas for further coaching.

You should also consider that you'll want easy access to these reports. There's nothing worse than having to spend hours poring over various data points to put a report together.

That's why you should choose sales management software that allows you to create a custom sales reporting dashboard.

9. Support/customer service

Don't forget, too, that you're going to need to spend some time getting your sales management software up and running.

Even then, you're probably going to be constantly testing and tweaking, and this might result in specific workflow changes in the software itself.

Therefore, it's a good idea to assess a software provider's commitment to supporting and customer service, and determine if that fits nicely with your needs.

Some companies are content-heavy, others give you a dedicated customer service rep that you have access to 5 days a week. Some give you either option, with different costs involved.

It helps to check out the reviews to find this information out for yourself when researching a system.

Speaking of the costs involved in implementing sales management software…

What Does Sales Team Management Software Cost?

Pipedrive vs. Copper vs. Ringy

Not every sales management system offers the same features or support, and as such, pricing often differs.

To give you some real-life insight, let's compare three of the top-performing sales management software platforms on the market right now.

*Pricing as of June 28, 2021

Conclusion

We covered a lot of ground today. Let's recap:

Sales management software is designed to help leaders and agents deliver on their sales targets, maintain customer relationships, track communications, report on performance, and fine-tune their sales strategies.

To get the most out of such a system, you should find one that includes these 9 features:

1. Contact management
2. Customer & lead management
3. Client interaction tracking
4. SMS marketing
5. Sales automation
6. Workflow management
7. Mobile support
8. Reporting and analytics
9. Support/customer service

Oh hey, that's us.

Why not get in touch and see how Ringy can transform your sales results?

Or sign up and find out how you can help your team get to the next level!