So, why do sales people need CRM?
Without fear of oversimplifying, the biggest challenges that sales people face are 1) how to qualify and follow up on leads and 2) how to prioritize sales activities.
However, CRM is a tool that not only solves those key problems. In fact, it is able to handle other, no less pressing issues.

1. Enjoy a safe storage space
CRM helps sales people to safely and centrally store their contacts, sales opportunities, activities and scheduled plans in one place, and have uninterrupted access to the database from multiple locations. Rest assured that your data won’t just get lost.

2. Plan and time-manage like a pro
CRM helps sales people to optimize their daily schedules and prioritize tasks to make sure customers are not ignored and the key prospects are contacted on time. In fact, CRM allows sales people to spend more time with customers, which leads to more deals closed and a stronger customer base.

3. Activity reports? – No brainer!
CRM helps sales people to easily prepare their weekly or monthly reports for management. The process is automated and transparent, and takes just a few clicks to inform others about what sales are currently in progress.

4. Stop surfing, start targeting
CRM helps sales people to segment data and identify valuable opportunities via criteria based selections. This prevents you from hours of cutting and pasting from various documents, or surfing in the disorganized lists of data.

5. Stay up-to-date on what’s happening
CRM offers shared calendars, document templates and e-mail integration, uniting all team members and keeping everyone up-to-date. Sharing selling patterns and processes allows sales people to see what works best. CRM also increases communication between the sales force and sales management.

6. Show up in time for the new sale
By tracking all communication with the customers, CRM helps sales people to know exactly when customers need to be contacted; for example, for product replacement, contract renewal, or for an upsell to a new product or service. This all increases your chances of closing a sale.

7. Rationalize your sales moves
CRM helps streamline the entire sales cycle, which results in closing deals in your sales pipeline and helping everyone in the team to reach targets faster. Since order processing and preparing quotes is automated in CRM, sales teams are able to reduce production costs and increase sales revenue.

8. Know what your customers really want
Since all the customer-related data is stored in CRM, it helps sales people to analyze the needs of customers and even anticipate their problems – all at the right time. All this increases customer satisfaction and ensures loyalty, as well as higher profit margins.

9. Cut down on admin tasks
CRM releases the sales teams from the majority of admin tasks by reducing and even removing some of the repetitive actions that take a lot of time, but yield little profitability. CRM stores product and price details, triggers reminders for activities, and takes sales people through the sales pipeline step by step.

10. Save money
Even though CRM systems are not cheap, they actually help you save your money!

With sales people, it is the reduction of mistakes (for example, in orders or quotes) that CRM can help with. Effort and cost related to correcting those errors may be much higher. Finally, it also boils down to such trivial things as saving money on those cluttering and often vanishing Post-it notes, since every new information can be safely stored in the system.