5 tips to improve your sales follow-up

Essential to your business, sales follow-up is a fundamental element of a successful company. From finalizing sales to accelerating lead conversion, sales follow-up is still the best way to get ahead.

Faced with this problem, which is inherent to the majority of business leaders, it remains important to improve, but above all to provide the best possible sales follow-up.

With this in mind, here are our 5 expert tips for providing a sales service and follow-up that will actively contribute to your company's growth.

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Tip 1: Rely on a powerful, sales-oriented CRM system

CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, enables anyone to manage a company's customer relationships and interactions. With this in mind, it's important for any company to have this type of software at its disposal. Not only to facilitate sales follow-up, but even more so to provide qualitative customer service.

As a tool for targeting and managing your list of prospects and customers, CRM must be adapted to your business activity, but also enable you to evolve, particularly if you wish to grow and scale.

In this vein, and to benefit from optimal sales follow-up that will bring you sales, but also positive social proof - via reviews for example - you'll need a powerful CRM.

And while there are many CRMs to choose from, you'll need to weigh up the pros and cons first and foremost, as well as the ones used by your competitors. Not only to avoid wasting time and money, but also to provide better sales follow-up than them.

These are essential points that will enable you to establish a precise framework for sales follow-up, through an organization that is often automated, but also human. A must for any business owner wishing to move up a gear.

Tip 2: Centralize and share customer information

This is another aspect to consider: sales follow-up must be placed at the heart of your business. In other words, targeting, customers, customer habits and all other accumulated information must be centralized and passed on to the various departments under the aegis of confidentiality.

It is essential for a company to work in concert when it comes to sales follow-up. All departments must be able to understand who the prospect is, why the prospect is a customer, and above all what the prospect expects.

This information will enable the sales, marketing and management departments to direct their campaigns, editorial lines and products. It is therefore essential that customer information be centralized, but also shared so as to harmonize the company's global vision, but also, and above all, the customer experience.

Tip 3: Automate your operations

In keeping with the logic of growth, any company wishing to expand and scaling up will have to automate its processes. It's essential to automate as many processes as possible. Not only because economies of scale will enable you to move up a gear, but also to create a partly freewheeling business. This is essential if you want to maintain a certain degree of flexibility.

This means that administrative, tax, sales and organizational tasks must be automated. This means using CRM and/or ERP systems to automate some of these processes.

Management will be carried out via software, most often SaaS, which will enable you to pre-fill certain forms, eliminate repetitive tasks by automating them, but also analyze customer information in the best possible way. In fact, the arrival of artificial intelligence enables business owners to automatically create groups of customers, and to sort and organize different prospects.

These are all aspects which, when put together, will enable you to create a semi-automated business, not only to make economies of scale, but also to concentrate your workforce on work that cannot be automated, such as direct customer relations.

Tip 4: Make responsiveness a sine qua non

Just as importantly, responsiveness remains a fundamental factor in customer relations and sales follow-up. In the age of the Internet and automated processes, prospects' expectations have changed: they want everything, right away.

With this in mind, it's essential for companies to provide fast, appropriate and, above all, direct customer service. In other words, you can no longer leave your customer alone or waiting for 5 minutes: the sooner you respond, the better off your company will be.

It's in this vein that we've seen the emergence of a number of solutions, including direct chat with an advisor. And all in less than a minute. In other words, a customer's query is resolved directly, and with minimal waiting time via chat.

Responsive support is essential, and the best companies have understood this. They all have a chat/email/telephone support team, which often responds within minutes of the request being made. This is an undeniable advantage over competitors who may take several days to respond, and run the risk of losing the lead or customer.

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Tip no. 5: set up a customer portal, a must

Setting up a dedicated portal is still a must. After all, chats, e-mails and telephone services can never replace a customer portal.

This type of portal first reassures the customer, and provides indirect support through FAQs, as well as various services enabling the customer to find the solution to his or her problem on his or her own. This saves time for the customer and money for you, because direct support costs money.

The customer portal is the link between your company and your direct support. It's an essential step, and one you'll find in all the market leaders. It's essential, too, if you want to present a serious image to the majority of your customers.

What's more - and this is the key point - this type of portal is highly scalable. Durable over time, easily translatable, and above all produced at a very low cost, the customer portal proves to be the number one ally of the modern company with an inherent desire for growth.

Sponsored article. Expert contributors are authors independent of the appvizer editorial team. Their comments and positions are their own.