A CRM is the best tool to effectively manage the sales pipeline - keeping it organized, transparent and consistent throughout the company - consistency being extremely important.
The pipeline tracks the company's entire sales process, including the status of ongoing sales, new sales projections and revenue forecasts.
Sales people use the pipeline to manage their accounts, sales management uses it to manage the sales people, and senior management uses it to manage the company. Then the CRM is used to manage the pipeline.
One identical process for the pipeline should be used by everyone, which keeps sales people and management coordinated. It should be maintained meticulously and always kept up to date. Remember, it's a company-wide process, not a collection of individual processes.
If not implemented on a company-wide basis, sales people will create separate versions, use differing formats, keeping them in scattered locations. This leaves the company pipeline in disarray. It creates additional work for and wastes time for everyone, making it difficult for management to manage, and inefficient for sales people to sell.
By managing the pipeline with a CRM everyone will use one process and one one format, assuring the company's efforts are aligned. It's kept in a centralized location that's readily accessible to all staff. This keeps everyone informed and makes it easy to update, review and manage - minimizing work, maximizing results, and saving valuable time.
Sales people:
The CRM increases the efficiency of sales people by allowing them to spend less time managing their pipeline and more time selling. It makes their job easier.
Using a CRM eliminates the need for sales people to create their own tracking methods with different applications. Sales people don't have to figure out what data to track and what not track. The CRM includes the necessary data required to use in the pipeline.
Sales people can keep the entire company apprised of their sales progress in real time - without having to communicate to multiple people multiple times. No need to send extra emails, make additional calls or hold redundant meetings.
Management:
A CRM gives management a clear view of the aggregate sales pipeline, including contributions from the individual sales people - efficiently managing the pipeline without wasting time.
Management can easily view progress and recognize trends. They can reliably access real opportunities vs. wishful thinking and identify strengths and weaknesses. Then allocate resources and set goals and priorities accordingly.
Without a CRM management cannot view the aggregate sales pipeline, making it more difficult to manage. Subsequently they manage each person separately, opposed to managing the sales group as a whole.
They spend time gathering and assimilating information from each sales person, including spreadsheets, emails, phone calls etc. - like reviewing the individual pieces of a puzzle instead of the finished product.
All this increases their work load and wastes time, hindering their effectiveness to manage the process, sales team and company.
