A successful engagement with a prospect is thrilling for any sales rep. The exact pipeline steps that follow will depend on your business and your products, but will include a pricing proposal, and hopefully, a signed contract.
Whether you’re the sole sales rep for your organization, or you’re a sales director overseeing a business unit, one fact holds true: your sales pipeline(s) should be highly visible, easily accessible to stakeholders, and (perhaps most importantly) up-to-date.
“Where Are We With This?”
Anyone with experience in sales has probably experienced routine questions about the status of their prospects in stand-up meetings, huddles, or check-ins. This can be frustrating for any rep. They know the answer—so why don’t their managers know the answer too?
The fact of the matter is that questions like “Where are we with this?” are often a direct result of unrefined communications and reporting processes.
So, how are you or your managers measuring sales reps’ status with their prospects, and are the dollar values of those prospects available at a glance?
If your software isn’t displaying sales pipelines in an intuitive way, it’s probably just plain easier to ask a rep about their work than it is to dig through software settings and menus.
Evaluating Your Current Sales Software’s Pipeline Capabilities
A quality CRM should provide all of the information you need to access your sales data. What comes next is determining if your current (or prospective) software is capable of displaying sales pipelines and reporting in ways that work with your business.
Three factors to consider when evaluating software sales reporting and pipeline capabilities include:
- Customization: Are the steps of your sales process easily customizable for your business and the products you sell?
- Readability: How many clicks does it take to get to the value of your prospect? More than a few, and you could be looking at the root cause of unnecessary meetings.
- Forecasting: Can you easily use your pipeline to forecast incoming business opportunities?
If your CRM solution is lacking in any of these three areas, your ad sales team may be spending extra hours trying to answer the eternal question of “Where are we with this?”
CRM Software Built for Ad and Media Sales
At Ad Sales Genius, we build software solutions to help publishers, media companies, and ad agencies sell more ads. With sales features like interactive opportunity pipelines and easy proposal-to-contract sales automation, our platform helps teams communicate better, increase their results, and produce ads faster and more accurately.
Interested in seeing how Ad Sales Genius can help your business work smarter? Click here to schedule a free, personalized demo today!