How to enhance your sales team’s productivity by reducing manual data entry

Driving your sales process is a task that requires you to be flexible yet time bound and that means that you must have tools that can guide you through the entire process and ease the flow at which your sales team can manage their overall productivity.

According to a recent study conducted by softwareadvice.com, around 71% sales reps revealed that most of their productive hours get wasted while doing manual data entry. Businesses face various pain points while adopting CRM software.

Manual data entry and the loss of productivity add on to the trouble and make it impossible for the sales team to get used to the CRM system because they find it as cumbersome to use.

What Does Your Sales Team Need to Have?

Sales reps working hours must never be eaten out by the task of documentation as it makes them slow and kills their selling instinct. Sales reps dislike many tedious tasks and if your chosen CRM offers the sales data automation that manages and updates these tasks with the help of automation then you can actually increase your sales team’s’ productivity.

Problems of Manual Data Entry

Cost of Hiring and Training the Staff

Extremely excessive cost of hiring when the question of employment comes. Even the training cost of the staff hired for the task for manual data entry is hefty.

The Team Morale

Sales reps lose the sight of their actual goal when they get busy feeding the data manually into the system. The waste of time is an added issue.

Crucial Business-related Process Gets Delayed

Sales is a numbers game and the under achiever will always lag back because of the baggage of manual data entry. Which means the overall team morale will go down. This has a negative impact on the sales figure and ultimately on the organization’s profitability.

Notable Benefits of Data Entry Automation

Based on the features and problems presented in front of you in this article, implementing data entry automation solution into your business will be beneficial to you in many ways:

Elimination of Human Error

Let’s take an example of banking sector.

The advanced data entry solutions are enabled with such technology with which they can recognize the relevant transactional data in scanned bank statements and online/PDF statements with Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

Moreover, nowadays, customers no longer have to work with badly formatted bank statements – you can generate a complete novelty bank statement in seconds with the format you want.

This advanced and incredibly accurate technology recognizes clearly formatted text on a bank statement, making it a more reliable method of data entry in comparison to a human.

Less Effort More Work

Manual data entry gets eliminated from the business process immediately which means that the relevant data gets entered into the system automatically. This allows better timeline to the manpower for completing other sales tasks.

Organizations have various tasks that are related to different departments; marketing, sales, finances and human resource. No matter their size, the documentation generated by them is humongous and comes from various sources; Post, Fax, Email, Voice, SMS, Web Forms, even XML and external systems. These sources carry documents that belong to; purchase orders, insurance claim, timesheets, remittances etc.

In addition to adopting automation solutions for data entry, providing your sales team with access to high-quality free invoice templates can streamline the billing process, saving precious time that can be better spent engaging with clients.

Your business process is heavily dependent on the data that comes with these documents and so it becomes important for you to sort them in the correct manner and make them easily available to the departments for quick decision making.

How Can Data Entry Automation System Help Your Sales Team Become Productive?

The main task of a CRM system is to manage all of your sales activities inside a single system helping you save the time you generally spend switching between various software. Integrating the business tools that are used by your team on a daily basis helps them stay focused and accomplish the tasks at hand with better efficiency.

Some data automation features of an apt CRM systems are:

Import Contacts from Any Source

Easily import your contacts from any source, spreadsheets or previous CRMs, and get your sales team up and running without any downtime.

Add Contacts with Single Click

The automation system pre fills the required fields allowing you the ease of just typing the contact field and adding the contact with just a single click.

Seamless Call Email and Activity Tracking

Make the most out of the click to call feature and enjoy automation of the call logs. Also make notes during the calls and schedule future meetings for every call you make, if required.

With workflow automation, you do not have to worry about logging every call you make, every mail you send or every activity you plan. The system effortlessly and automatically tracks the calls, emails and the activities to the respective deals and contacts.

Capture Leads

Using web forms on your contact page, capture the leads and automate the task of assigning them to your sales reps the moment they are added to your contacts. Create reminders for each stage of the sales funnel for your leads so that there is no lapse in following up with them. Keep a tab on the duration a lead spends in one stage of the sales pipeline and avoid having rotten (missed) leads.

Synchronize Mails and Calendar

Integrating your emails and calendar within the CRM system means you switch less between applications and software for finding relevant information. Your CRM system will send you every alert regarding incoming emails and every upcoming event you have in your calendar.

Enrich Your Contacts Profile

Most of the leads do not provide their full details like social handles or secondary contact details. Today with the help of integrations and automation CRM system, have become smart enough in tracking and updating the details of your clients.

The software can find:

• Social profiles
• Title
• Website URLs
• Email addresses, etc.

Automate the Task of Delegation

No more issue of doing busywork and not getting any return for the time and energy vested in capturing and handling the leads. You can use data automation systems to delegate various tasks to your sales team without much labor. With the workflow automation feature of a CRM system, you can assign deals to your sales reps, send automatic welcome and notification emails to your customers and leads. Rotate deals, allot score to the leads, notify internal users about the created deals and update various records.

If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done. – Bruce Lee

To be more productive, your team needs the best solution that you can provide to them whenever there is a problem in the workflow of their sales process. Manual data entry has always been the thorn that could not be avoided while touching a garland of rose. But today the technology has become so advanced that the issue of manual data entry can be easily taken care of.

Give your sales team the best sales automation software that can ease the pressure of data management and data entry off your sales reps. you can visit us to know more on how you can help out your team to increase their productivity.