BESMA SPONSOR | INTERVIEW
CHAMPIONING CRM Winning Edge meets Sridhar Iyengar, who has been with Zoho since its inception, thoroughly enjoying its journey from start-up to global corporation What is Zoho? Zoho is one of the world’s most prolific software companies. Our online platform is capable of running an entire business, with over 45 apps in nearly every major business category, including sales, marketing, customer support, accounting and back office operations, and an array of productivity and collaboration tools.
set scoring rules to prioritise leads that can generate the most revenue. l Configure automatic actions like sending email notifications, assigning tasks to employees, and updating fields to take place immediately or at a scheduled time once the defined criteria are met. l Keep contacts updated regularly on what matters using schedules, for example on new products or upcoming events.
How can sales teams use CRM to help them sell more effectively? How can sales teams ensure they “Sales teams used to operate comply with GDPR? Depending on the vendor and whether it in silos. Sometimes this led to uses an integrated platform, CRM can be GDPR compliance can be achieved used to help understand customers better and through using the right tools to ensure customer needs not being met guide the way you engage with them using customer data is not compromised and not from the outset. Today’s the metrics from the tools to enable customer shared with people that shouldn’t have expectations are higher” success. It can also record data to provide access to it. GDPR-compliant tools should insights into how a prospect initially engaged, be used right across sales, marketing and as well as what they were most interested in during support. This way compliance is automated and the engagement. If the CRM system supports in-built in a way that all data meets compliance omnichannel communication, it can be used to guidelines, no matter what the activity. engage with the customer across any means of What are today’s chief challenges in communication, such as LinkedIn, Twitter or other achieving sales targets? channels. This enables you to truly personalise your approach, giving more likelihood of sales success. Today’s landscape is quite different from 10 or 20 years ago. Sales teams used to operate in silos, What can automation in sales achieve? simply handing over the lead to the implementation Automation can help sales teams and aid sales team once a deal was closed. Sometimes this led to processes in many ways. It can help easily tackle the customer needs not being met from the outset, as inefficiencies of your team or business processes what sales had promised was not delivered. Today’s and ensure you still have sufficient time to focus on expectations are higher. A prospect expects a other priorities to enhance your company’s salesperson to listen to and understand their needs productivity and growth. It can also improve the and wants to ensure the onboarding process and prospect experience and keep them engaged. If you ongoing relationship with a company is seamless. are using the right CRM system you should exploit In a solely sales-driven culture there is a danger its full capabilities to improve your performance. of creating a dissatisfied customer base. To avoid this, an organisation must consider a strategy and What are your top tips? culture based on the customer. The customer l Consider workflow management features to help journey should be plotted out from initial perform a variety of actions, either instantly or at a engagement onwards and all teams should work scheduled time. This helps your company both together to deliver an excellent customer experience improve efficiency and manage its business better. that encourages repeat business. It can also create l Ensure the right assignment rules are set. For customer advocacy. example, you can have leads automatically assigned For everyone across an organisation to work SRIDHAR IYENGAR is head of to selected sales reps in a round robin pattern, together most effectively in this way requires European operations for Zoho assigning tasks for each lead. integrated software. This often means it has to be Corporation. He has spent over 20 l Ensure you are delivering a great service. Set case years building B2B software and on the same platform so that data can be shared has played leadership roles in escalation rules to ensure that every case or ticket in easily between departments and merged to create a product management, business your organisation is answered before its due date. single customer view, to give any user the full development, marketing and l Not every lead is of equal importance. You can picture during any customer interaction. engineering. ISMPROFESSIONAL.COM
WINNING EDGE 15
