On Demand Webinars
How to overcome common sales workflow challenges in your CRM
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Struggling with bottlenecks in your sales processes? In this webinar, our CRO, Fredrik, will dive into the most common challenges faced by sales teams and share practical strategies for overcoming them. Learn how automation, improved communication, and smarter workflows can streamline your operations, helping your team work more efficiently.
With insights from Omnitas, Make and monday.com solutions, this session will equip you with tools to tackle sales challenges head-on.
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So, everyone, as I said, very much welcome to this morning's webinar about how to overcome common sales workflow challenges or challenges in your CRM basically. So, I have with me a few challenges that we're gonna go into one after the other. And if you have any questions, you can see to the right of your screen, that you have a question section. Please use that. And if I feel that I haven't answered your questions, I will try to get to them at the end. But I promise that I will try my best to make sure that all questions are answered before we leave here today. So, let me see here now. There I am. So, let's get into the into our first challenge this morning. So, yeah, the anemic pipe. Probably the number one challenge for all sales organizations. Basically, we don't have a pipeline to support the sales numbers we are targeting. And this, I hear from a lot of people. So, but I have a lot of senior sales reps. They've been doing this for years and years and years. And yeah, my only answer to that is actually that doesn't actually make for you to have a more filled up pipeline because to keep a good pipeline, there's actually a lot amount of work. And also, we can see this in most sales organizations. The more senior we get, the more we tend to not to like to do the grunt work or that the real work of the sales organization. Which is prospecting and outreach and all of those lovely, lovely things that we actually need to do. Because, of course, if you sit there with an anemic pipe, you can, of course, hope that, yeah, my inbound is going to sort this. Yeah. But to build an inbound pipe and having those leads delivered to you, that actually requires a lot, not the least from your marketing department. And it also takes a lot of time to build up. SEO isn't built overnight and so on, so forth. Right. So we maybe that's not the quick fix, at least, or the quickest of fixes. So I would put it. So here, my top tip is actually we need to get into prospecting and outreach. But we need to do it smartly because, well, the 80s have come and gone and we can't just. Do what they did in the 80s and basically bring forth the yellow pages and just go calling one number after another. That is not efficient. It's not fun. And yeah, I would reckon that most sales reps would have a complaint or two if that is your main strategy. Instead, we need to be smart about our prospecting. What we did here at Omnitas is actually we built a. BDR in a box or a An assistant of sorts, which actually relies a lot of on AI. So what it actually does, it. Takes a look, so we do the prospecting ourselves in terms of defining our target groups and our ICPs, ideal client profiles. But then we feed these. Company leads or these people that come out of that to our AI. Who actually goes in, takes a look at that company website, checks the numbers of that company, but also dives in to that person that we have said. So whether that's the CRO like me at the company or if it's a CEO or if it's a project manager or whoever and checks their LinkedIn profile as well so we can see what are they posting about? What's their personal stats? So to speak. And then in combination with knowing what use case or what I'm actually trying to sell or what I want to talk about, it actually takes a look at all of these and this information and makes a one a report. So basically, what are the challenges related to my use case? Of course, for this person, for in their role, in their job, in your geography, in their specific industry niche, etc, etc So it compiles a fairly comprehensive report. So I have good material to. Basically, I cut down my research time, so I don't need to do all of that research into the company. So actually, the AI helps me with that. What it also does actually drafts or it creates a draft for a first outreach. So basically telling me OK, so with all these facts, I think this is along the lines what we maybe should email this person or reach out with them to on LinkedIn and so forth. This actually saves us a huge amount of time and it also becomes much smarter and it's challenge based or pain focused selling, which is much, much, much, much more effective than just going, hi, I'm selling socks. Want to buy some? That usually doesn't work anymore. So we need to actually make it about the prospect. What's their challenges? What's their needs? And so on. It's not about us. It's all about them and what we can do to help them alleviate the challenges they have. And our assistant actually helps with that. So this is actually one of those places where AI can shine and really help. Second challenge. The administration rock stars, and I'm of course talking about all the lovely salespeople out there. I'm one of them. So I'm part of this group. We are so good at so many things. Administration is usually not one of them. I've been in sales for the last 20 years, more than 20 years, actually. I'm getting that old. But there's basically one thing that will make me go, whoa. And that is a salesperson who's actually good at administration. That's just not in the stars for most of us. So, but this leads to one thing, especially, and that's like notes of meetings and having that structure of a meeting. So we actually take our notes. So because our notes, that's what lets us have a smoother sales process down the line. If you aren't very, very transactional in your sales, it's like, hi, I'm selling this, want to buy and then bye-bye. But most of us, especially in B2B sales, it's longer sales process. We actually need to remember what we talked about. We need to prepare something for the next meeting. And most of our salespeople, we often rely a bit too much to try to remember everything. Well, this isn't doable over time. And also, especially after COVID, where we ended up having a lot more web meetings, which also meant we ended up having a lot more back-to-back meetings. So not only were we not very good from the start at doing these meeting annotations and summaries and jotting down all our notes from the meeting, but we also are in a situation now after COVID where we quite often don't even have the time to do it properly. So what we've done instead is well, we use AI. So basically record our meetings and have the AI transcribe it, but not only transcribe it, because let's face it, one hour meeting, that's going to be like 20 word pages long as a transcription, right? That's not readable. We can't have that. So instead, what we use the AI for is one of the things that AI does really, really well. Summarize. So it can summarize our meeting. Bring out the key takeaways and the action points that actually create those tasks in our CRM system. So not only does it make the note, it actually creates the tasks for us. So I know that, yeah, by tomorrow, I've promised that client to send them a quote or whatever, so I don't miss it. So we can keep up that professionality towards our prospects and our clients. Really, really important. And this is such a good use case for helping our salespeople with doing this part of the administration. Next challenge, and I'm going to keep to the same theme here because it's all revolving around the same thing. We aren't that great at administration and we salespeople, we're always running towards the next thing, right? Which means, yeah, yeah, I'll type something in. So which makes for our CRM, our systems quite often having duplicate information, faulty information, missing information, and a lot of those fun stuff, which makes reporting, forecasting, and just having that data-driven sales approach almost impossible. Because I just don't have the data of, okay, so this company you entered in over here, what industry are they in? Where are they located? How large are they? How many employees do they have? The turnover, etc, right? We don't have that information. And also, we keep to not adhering to naming conventions like we, Omnitas Consulting, our proper legal name, the Swedish branch, is Omnitas Consulting AB. It's limited in the UK. But also keeping to that legal entity name also makes it a lot easier because then we have a structure for how we do things instead of going Omnitas. Yeah, but which Omnitas? There's actually a few. We have Omnitas in Sweden. We have Omnitas in the UK or Omnitas in Nordic, I should say. Omnitas UK. Or we have our group company, which is Omnitas Consulting Group AB. So, and here, this leads to a lot of problems and especially on the, data-drivenness of the organization. And this is where a sales organization really can shine because if we have those metrics, this data can be so valuable for us. So when we can start to analyze, okay, but what prospects, what clients, where do we sell most? Where do we have the shorter sales process, etc, etc? What's the lowest hanging fruit, basically, instead of just going by gut feeling, because gut feeling have it's not always correct. Let's put it like that A good fix for this, is to make it easier for the sales rep to actually to make the right decision and do the right thing, then doing what they usually do What we've actually done is we created a plugin for the monday.com CRM where you can basically go to, if you're in the UK, Endol, if you're in the US, Crunchbase, if you're in Scandinavia, Prof or whatever. Yeah, it's a website, prof.se or DK, etc. Basically find the company and then just click the Chrome extension and it will take all of that data and actually enter it into your system. Of course, it will check so it doesn't make a duplicate. And if it finds that it's already entered, it will instead enrich the data. So I'm making it really, really easy for the sales rep to do the right thing. Same with contact people. Yeah, find them on LinkedIn. Click the Chrome extension and wham, bam, you have a new contact in your system. Make it easy because let's face it, we can nag people to death. This isn't just going to sort itself over time or anything. We need to give people the right tooling to do their job and just realize we're getting salespeople to deal with this level of administration. It's a bit like herding cats at the end of the day. It just won't work. So make it easy for them. Then we have the next challenge. So now we actually get to number three. So a bit of new areas here. Challenge three, hope where there is none. Yeah, I try to be funny with this one. But basically what I see when I'm out and consulting, I see a lot of hope where we shouldn't have hope. And what I mean with this is we see those opportunities that's been dragging on forever. They've been open in the system for a year or more, even though our normal sales process is maybe, what, one, two, three months or something like that. But we see those just dragging on and just being moved forward every month. So this creates a bit of a problem because we get a bloated forecasting with this because they're basically probably not going to come in, right, this month either. And I usually say hope. That's the last thing that leaves the dog or the sales rep. We always hope there is that chance of growing that. But so having this stagnant pipe, that becomes a problem, especially for me or people like me as a sales manager when we're trying to do the forecast. Well, is this actually coming in this month? So how I've set this up or how I usually set this up for my clients is here we can use the CRM. And this isn't a monday.com specific. This is doable in most CRM systems or at least most CRM systems deserving the name. Basically, we can set up an automation to basically tell us when we have moved an opportunity too many times or when it's just grown stagnant. No one has touched it for a set amount of time. We can prompt both the sales manager or market for them or Decrease the probability of it to zero, and notifying the sales rep owning that opportunity to say hey, mate, you need to either disqualify this or we need to get a move on with it. Which is it? And the least thing we can do is set probability to zero so it doesn't affect our forecasting. So we can set up a probability to zero. Easy fix, doable in most serum systems, but it's actually valuable. And your forecasting will most likely actually start resembling a more truthful picture quite quickly. Last one for today. Challenge number four or five, if we don't count that half. And that's currency conversions. So in a quite global market, and I'm European, which means we are almost 30 countries in the European Union. And then we have our friends in the UK. And we're actually, what, 47 countries, something like that in Europe. And then we tend to deal a lot with America and so on as well. We have a lot of different currencies going on. Me as a Swede, of course, my reporting is in Swedish crowns. We don't have the euro over here. So it's in Swedish crowns. But I'm making deals in dollars, in euros, in pounds, in Australian dollars and Canadian dollars as well. So there's a lot of currencies going on. And what's even worse for me is that I can have actually several different currencies in a single deal. And my main problem here is that a US dollar, a euro and a pound, they aren't worth the same amount. A pound is what, 1.2, 1.3 dollars. The euro is 1.1 dollars, something like that. And all of them are more than 10 Swedish crowns. So I have a problem. So they aren't comparable to each other if I don't harmonize them into a single currency. I mean, 10,000 euros is definitely not the same thing as 10,000 Swedish crowns. It's more like, what, 110,000 Swedish crowns at the moment. So I need to harmonize this. There's different ways to do this. And basically how your financial team basically goes about this will kind of determine how you do it. So some, they trade in warranties and stuff like that. So they basically have a set exchange rate on a set interval, basically maybe per month or per week or something like that. It's quite easy to tweak your CRM system to actually know that currency. You have a fixed currency in that time period. And basically, if you add something into pounds, it will know, okay, so right now we are paying 12 crowns per pound or whatever, and then actually converting everything to a harmonized currency. What I've done here at Omnitas is actually we go by live exchange rates because we don't trade in all of those things. So instead, what I've done is we've set up an integration directly to the European Central Bank. So if I have an opportunity with one or several currencies that are not Swedish crowns, it will actually take a look and say, okay, so I have something here for X amount of dollars. That is Y amount of Swedish crowns. And it will put it in. Of course, I won't overwrite the actual dollar amount because that was what the deal actually was in. Then I can actually use this data also then to compare with the invoicing part of it. So I can also, calculate what was the exchange rate differences and so on. But this is actually one very easy integration to make as well. But this is really, really important. And I see so many companies struggle with this, having to report in different currencies or having to manually enter the currencies and the exchange rate of them, if at all. What I've seen even more often is like the opportunity list or the closed down deals and just different currencies, which means that the bottom line doesn't mean anything. So this is actually, it's a really easy fix to make, but it's so powerful because we actually get a much better grip on our financials. So one thing to take as a homework and go home and do. And if you're running a monday.com CRM, please come to me. If you don't know how to do it, we can have a talk about it. I can help you. It's not a big thing to do. So it's just give me a shout out on LinkedIn or give me an email, fredrik@omnitas.se. You can just email me and I will be sure to be able to guide you and help you. And that's it for today. I'm going to see here. Checking the questions right now. Yeah, not much we haven't gone through, actually. So I'll give this a minute or so if we have any final questions. No. Okay, then. Then I'll go back to this and I bid you the best of Fridays. And I hope you have a great weekend. And I hope to see you next time. So if you haven't signed up to our newsletters, or if you don't follow us on YouTube, please go on, do that. Our newsletters are monthly. They come the last Wednesday of every month. And there you also get the compilation of what's the coming webinars or what's the webinars maybe that you missed. You can access them from the recording. And also you get first dibs on our events. And we have a lot of events planned for the future. So make sure to sign up for the newsletter and be the first to know when something new happens. Until next time, everyone. Have a great Friday. Bye.