You recently came across the CRM of your dreams. It’s intuitive, effective and supports your scalability ambitions. You want to adopt it as quickly as you can. But you are nervous about how well your team will adopt this new technology. You’ve tried to make changes earlier and it wasn’t accepted as unanimously as you’d have hoped. What makes this time any different? How do you encourage people at different strata, with different needs and goals to unite and adopt a solution? You turn towards Vince Lombardi for some motivation:
“Individual commitment to a group effort: That is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.“
For any solution to be successful, it’s important to receive buy-in throughout the organisational hierarchy. Every role is important for the overall success. For an enthusiastic acceptance, it is important to step into their shoes and understand what a CRM can provide for each member of the team since each constituency has different pain points, different goals, and different motivations.
To make it easy for you, we have tried to breakdown the stakeholders into three major groups. We have outlined their goals and how we can help them. Evaluating the substantial growth that they will receive is sure to ensure active participation.
Senior Management
Let’s start at the top and address the needs of the management.
At the top level, management is mostly concerned with granular data which can help them achieve double-digit growth. For this, management’s focus mainly lies in:
- Market Hotspots: An analysis of key areas/regions where presence would supplement growth ambitions
- Category Analysis: Analyzing macro and micro categories with high growth potential
- Market positioning: Study market needs and demands, competitor analysis, etc.
- Allocating resources: Decisions related to the size of the sales fleet, developing marketing collateral, product portfolios to support future growth, etc.
- Predictive analysis: Analyzing expected market conditions, predicting change based on current market tilt to plan forward and derive benefits as a first mover. Management wants a predictable trend of growth when incremental resources are invested.
A CRM solution helps senior executives make calculated decisions. It takes the guesswork out of the strategy by churning data collected at various touch-points into insights that can help them understand their current and future trends.
Peri understands this requirement quite well and hence offers a gamut of features focusing on each of these major areas. Here is a snapshot of a few integrated features of Peri.
- Business Analytics: It helps in identifying – high movement products and areas associated with them, seasons which support sales, best talent within the workforce, etc. among other insights.
- Interaction Management: Each transaction between the company and the customer, produces valuable information. These interactions help translate customer buying behavior patterns into strategies for future growth.
- Territory and Distribution Management: It helps in improving the economics of the supply chain through smarter pathways by strategic deployment of resources.
- Product Management: Peri offers integration with leading ERP like SAP and Microsoft NAV to support an integrated management system. The SKU master aids in the management of all various product details, literature, pricelist, catalogs at the unit level.
Sales Manager
Sales managers are the bridge between the upper executives and field operatives of a company. Their work enablement requires overlap between management and execution.
Similar to the field operatives, they have to complete their quota and win sales through the team. They are also responsible for designing the beat plan and allocating resources on the field. They must also overlook the smooth flow of the supply chain in their territory. Apart from these, Sales managers are entrusted with on-field training, employee motivation, and performance improvement of the team.
To handle such widespread bulk of assignments, automation of repetitive tasks becomes critical. This where a robust CRM can help lift all that weight and automate basic tasks.
A CRM platform provides a handy visual guide of the field data, easy delegation of duties, controlling targets and evaluating each field force worker’s day to day activities, and generate reports to track performance.
The modules embedded in Peri’s catalog of solutions include:
- Target Management: It aids in having an aligned workforce that is motivated and highly effective
- Territory Management: Peri’s intelligent algorithm offers smart mapping of retail clusters
- Employee Management: Peri has an innovative approach to attendance, profiling, organizational hierarchy. Its reporting system is designed to aid productivity management.
- Distribution and Inventory Management: Distribution channels are the highways for supply chain management. To ease inventory management at all these intermediaries, Peri offers integration of distribution and inventory management. Peri’s slogan is “Distribution Reach + Service = Sales”.
Frontline Sales
Field sales operatives are most concerned with making sales.
They have targets to meet within a given timeline. They must connect with a number of outlets each day, establish connections with them and increase wins.
This non-tech workforce has to carry bulky brochures, price-lists, schemes, and marketing collateral while they hunt for new prospects. They then enter the details of their entire day into complicated software or excel spreadsheet.
In a few cases, field operatives have to enter the details onto a register which then needs to be fed into an Excel sheet at the end of the day. This Excel sheet then needs to be processed by executives down the line. This additional admin task eats away anywhere between 20%-30% of their productive time.
Peri’s focus is to help these sales heroes save their time and let them enjoy their work. Peri’s CRM Solution offers:
- Geo-Fencing: Peri has shifted the paradigm of how geo-mapping is done. It helps field operatives scan for prospects in an area. It makes locating and visiting outlets much easier. Operatives are able to meet more retailers and fetch more sales.
- Customer Management: Managing customer details is very easy and can be done in a few, simple and intuitive steps helping sales reps dedicate more time in interaction rather than data entry.
- Impressive UX/UI: Embodying the concept of minimalism, the app has been designed by top designers experienced in interaction sciences. The colors, bells, and menus have filtered out the clutter to give a simplistic experience of user interface which breaks the monotone and makes it fun.
- Order and Schemes management: Peri enabled salesforce no longer needs to carry bulk and load of marketing content. Mobility solution allows the frontliners to instantly download and stay updated with all the literature. They can place orders with a few entries instead of waiting for the end of the day to initiate.
- Expense Management: Peri CRM helps track expenses made in the field through defined policy and industry trends. This eases the load of approving and claiming expenses from the accounts department.
Summary/Last words
When you understand your team and speak to them in their language, it creates an empathetic connection and a healthy work culture. When your team members, especially the ones representing your company’s reputation on the field in the market feel like their pain has been heard, it creates a loyal workforce driven towards a common ambition.
Introducing an effective CRM like Peri caters to their basic needs and frees up time. This tangible result of having more time in hand to spend around more productive activities motivates the team. Increased productivity is the immediate ROI which can be measured by all the stakeholders. This creates an alignment within the workforce that makes strategy implementation successful.
To further understand how Peri’s features empower teamwork and self-regulation read 6 reasons how peri creates a connected and effective workforce.
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