Streamline your sales automation process for teams

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the broadcast is now starting all attendees are in listen only mode good morning everybody thank you for joining the sugar serum and Synergy Solutions uh webinar on how to make sugar how how sugar Mak sales team more effective uh my name is Lauren Chang calling with Sugar CRM uh we are excited to have you join our webinar today uh today we have Nick shamberger with Synergy Solutions who have been a partner of sugar for past six years helping us serve over hundred their customers and Nick today will be showing you how sugar can make your team a lot more effective more organized and help you close more deals Nick hey thanks very much Lawrence and I again appreciate our partnership over the last several years and um really excited to talk about uh one of my favorite things I gotta tell you it it helps a lot when uh you enjoy what you do and uh helping sales teams and marketing teams and customer service teams to succeed is a a real uh great calling and uh you know today we're going to focus on the needs primarily of the sales folk and we're going to take a look at a little bit of uh information about a day in the life of a sales representative and that of a sales manager as well uh we are going to be recording this session so we will be making it available after uh we're done uh we'll be able to post it on the Synergy Solutions website for folks who um were not able to make it to the actual uh presentation as those kinds of things happen but uh again appreciate everybody who has joined us for this morning's uh presentation and uh want to encourage you that uh this go to webinar uh conferencing service that we're using does incorporate um you know a questions uh capability and so if uh you'd like to enter questions we may have some time uh you know towards the end of the presentation to address a couple of things and uh would be uh happy to see if we can't uh do that and if we run out of time for that what we'll do is we'll plan on at followup connection um from myself to anyone that uh has asked a question we weren't able to get to so just wanted to kind of put that out there at the start but I'll go ahead and uh go ahead and commence the presentation here and we will be actually looking at Sugar CRM today as well uh so don't uh don't PR we won't be doing Death by PowerPoint but it is a great Tool uh for introducing some uh things that we'll be discussing today so for us Sugar CRM have uh always I'm sorry Synergy Solutions we've always been a CRM focused uh organization and those applications that we um added to our stable of solutions and our toolbox have all been in the support of effective CRM deployments and so you'll see on our screen here we have um representation from Google Apps um which integrates beautifully with Sugar CRM right out of the box as well as Acton which is a powerful marketing automation tool um and then we also have telepan integration through 10f which is um another one of our um many different solutions that work with Sugar CRM um as you can see on our slide here we've also done um custom solutions that we Market from you know for QuickBooks uh integration as well as um our development of a specialty construction CRM vertical um and uh we have uh really enjoyed working with Sugar CRM there're you know just on a very high level there are a lot of CRM Solutions on the market but we have not encountered any um that are is open in what they provide to their customers for accessing uh the configuration of the system um and the ability to fully customize because we have access to all the code there's nothing locked away from us that we know can't modify and so for those um customers who have been frustrated by a CRM that just doesn't seem to be able to be configured to their business processes Sugar CRM has really excelled in that department and uh I've had even very uh brainy engineers uh like my uncle who has a satellite uh POS you know Telemetry tracking and antenna uh installation and manufacturing company that have said gosh this is a good piece of software and that's how I compliment coming from such an exacting engineer but uh I'll go ahead and uh talk a little bit about what you know teams often are going to benefit from using sugar serum not everybody's sure whether they are in the right place when they're looking at customer relationship management software and so you know just a couple of things that I think uh sugar excels at are you know integrating both prospecting and sales teams if you're familiar at all with um some of the movement in um kind of creating uh reliable revenue streams there has been a lot of move toward sort of separating the roles a little bit of the prospector um and perhaps also called a lead developer and the actual account Executives who complete sales and sugar has some very good capability in terms of handing off uh from the early stages of marketing and then uh lead development into creating um qualified prospects that are going to be then handed off to an account executive to complete the more uh perhaps um technical um and and uh you know relationship driven uh long-term uh sales process so uh sugar has got some excellent automation around the notifications that to occur in those scenarios so um we'll see a little bit of an example of that later um customer service and support we have a lot of clients uh in our um uh customer base at Synergy that are selling products that require ongoing relationships with your customer service team and thankfully sugar is designed to give you a 360 degree view of the customer relationship and so of course we incorporate tracking of customer service uh issues and their resolution and we have some excellent support tools like a customer self-service portal for submitting cases and things like that so customers love it to uh mobile we've got a lot of folks out there that need to um have uh access even when they're on an airplane and don't have a Wi-Fi connection at the time we've got a great mobile application that does some excellent offline data caching that's been a big bonus and um you know for field sales and field technicians alike the ability to update case information or um respond to changes in scheduling and things like that have all been a real great benefit to many clients uh marketers and Lead developers and especially when you can connect sugar Serum with a a marketing automation tool like Acton it becomes a very complete um you know full sales process uh you know tool where we can take folks who have just visited our website and maybe um asked for a white paper download or you know filled in a subscription to your newsletter form kind of a thing and just beginning to get them into the CRM right away so we can look at things like their website of browsing history on your company's site and then tracking them through their responses to emails and actually providing lead scoring that lets us figure out which prospects are the most likely to buy great great set of tools there and then we have um reporting and notification systems that are designed to help executive management to respond more quickly to changing situations in their business and with their opportunities so pretty much anybody who talks to interfaces with a customer in any shape or form uh can benefit from having access to a centralized database like sugar and so we're going to take a look a little bit about uh the sales part of that process today we're going to stay focused in that area so we've talked about the entire customer life cycle we're going to touch a little bit on quoting today as well uh we're going to talk about um some of the things that we do Post sale a lot of folks like I've said before have kind of moved into uh needing to focus a little bit more on their postale because harvesting additional revenue from uh customers who uh you've already connected to is a lot easier than adding new customers in many cases and so we're going to talk to some of the ways that sugar helps us do a good job of that so first off we'll talk about the day in the life of the sales rep what I'm going to de is you know we could come up with dozens examples but I'm going to basically take a few examples from the life of a sales rep in their dayto day I'm GNA take a few from the life of a sales manager in their day-to-day and we're going to talk to how Sugar CRM helps solve particular challenges that come up uh for each of those roles so I would say uh for sales reps one of the things that we repeatedly hear from our customers are I I really want to be able to help my sales reps stay focused on those tasks which are going to make them most effective at what they need to accomplish to close more business and there are a number of ways that Sugar CRM makes sales teams more effective through um our ability to bring important uh information to the Forefront and our very customizable dashboards are one of the best ways that we do that and so what we have is often times we're trying to identify things like which of my current proposals that are out have been out for an uh a longer period of time sometimes companies do the analysis they figure out things such as you know every time a proposal is out without a response for more than 14 days that we see a 60% drop in our close rate you know and those are the kinds of things you can start to analyze when you have a good CRM database with strong reporting tools and so when you figure that kind of a thing out you can say okay how are we going to prevent um the lack of followup that leads to those things languishing and staying out there for too long well this is one of the ways we do that we bring those deals to the attention of the sales rep on their customized dashboard so that instead of them having to dig for the information the information's pushed to their uh attention as soon as they log into the application so I'm going to take just a moment here and um we're going to bring Sugar CRM up on the screen for you and give you a look at that so right here we have an example of a sales reps dashboard and I'm just going to point out a few of the things that help sales representatives to do a really good job with that and so if you look here we first of all have an immediate look at what my upcoming tasks are and my activities and so you know as I log in on a given day I'm kind of wanting to get my head straight into what I need to have accomplished what interactions I need to be prepared for and so I can immediately see any tasks that I haven't completed those that I have coming up so that if I need to take um action ahead of the due date I can certainly do so and then those that I've got that don't have a particular due date uh but just need to get done and then I also have things like visibility into my activities what meetings do I have coming up and what calls do I have coming up I also have an immediate look at what the opportunity pipeline is looking like where are my deals right now or do I have the most deals that I need to move into that later stage of getting a deal closed but in specific terms here's my deals pending sale I've got a filtered uh list dashlet and we can create as many of these as are needed for all the different scenarios you need to draw your rep's attention to in this case we're looking at all of those that are in a negotiation or proposal stage so these are the ones that are ending towards getting towards the end of the funnel that we really need to carry across the finish line and so of course we want to make sure that we're following up with these uh and making sure that any next steps that are required are are getting completed in a timely fashion so we just kind of put those front and center and uh we have a very customizable dashboard you know so that we can create multiple uh views uh we would be able to switch between different dashlets or dashboard views excuse me uh by choosing between them from here so we have a great deal of flexibility and I think a fantastic tool um in that respect now let's take a look at another uh potential challenge to our sales reps uh activity history and followup so we've really kind of already addressed this as we looked at the dashboard but it's just worthy to point out that we go beyond just call meeting and pass tracking we have full uh integration with email and we'll uh speak to that uh today and uh you know so we have the prompters on scheduled activities but a lot of folks they say hey look I live out of my Outlook a lot of the time I really need all of that information there great we have that covered too and so in Sugar CRM we bring an Outlook integration that I think is probably one of the best uh in the market and as you can see here I'm looking at an email message that's come into my inbox and you can see a lot of information on the screen right away that's extremely helpful uh so for example I have um the information that this was archived to Sugar so this email was actually archived under uh this uh contact inside my sugar database and so I know that anybody else including my manager who needs to see information about this uh will be able to see it uh without any difficulty I also have a a very helpful sidebar here which gives me information uh from Sugar CRM uh right inside of my Outlook and of course any of these linked items will take me straight to relevant information if I want to go to the parent company record and look at information about the other uh contacts in that company I can click that link and go straight into Sugar CRM to do so uh this link will take me into um a map so I can immediately get directions if I need to head out and go meet with that client um I can also see some of my opportunity history task history call history notes history case history even so uh really a very comprehensive tool and one that allows us to not only archive messages but also to synchronize calendars as I spoke before uh we do have the ability to uh create those calls and meet meeting schedules and synchronize them from sugar to Outlook and vice versa as well as your task lists if you like manage your tasks from Outlook you can create them in Outlook and see them in sugar and vice versa so we really have a a very nice bidirectional tool and this is included in all subscriptions of Sugar CRM it's not an extra cost item so hopefully you can see some benefits to improving your sales team's Effectiveness when they can get all of that information at a glance right inside of their Outlook now let's go to our next slide okay many reps uh find that they uh require a lot of time to generate quotes and I will tell you that many of my customers are still trying to pop out quotes using Microsoft Word um sometimes it's because they have a lot of variable text in terms of terms and conditions or they just have very complex pricing um you know that requires a lot of uh manual work in order to produce a quality quote uh but thankfully uh Sugar CRM can really help with that and you know another thing that is often a concern from my clients is that you know maybe their accounting department is using something like QuickBooks Enterprise and they could do quote entry from there but a lot of times they want to keep the sales reps out of the accounting system they just want to let the finance department do that um and so in order to give them a a a less risky way of producing quotes but still doing so in a way that um you know allows uh you know professionally produced uh you know goodlook quotes to come out sugar has put that functionality in and we include um a really robust uh product catalog with lots of uh capabilities for categorization of your products so that it can be easy to retrieve uh products from a large list um and catalog and of course um we have the ability to Output to PDF and I will show you that right now so let's take a look at the sugar interface first I'll show you what the quote data entry screen looks like we'll move right here and this is a uh example of a quote and so you can see here that a quote can be conveniently tied to a specific opportunity you can of course have multiple quotes So if you need to quote variants on an offer uh you can do so and then of course we have SIMPLE line item information just like you'd expect to see with our quantities and we can uh choose whether to make certain parts of that visible and of course we have subtotal sections and then a grand total area and you have a lot of control over the way the output looks which is fantastic because there is a built-in PDF designer um it's it's HTML driven so if you want to do do some fancy styling and you have the ability to do that you certainly can I know that um we've certainly done a number of very nice looking Uh custom templates this is sort of an example from the outof the boox quote template and so you can see this output is quite professional and we have the ability to um enable additional text boxes that can appear in the output so for example if you had special terms and conditions that only applied when specific products are sold you could have somebody check a box in the quote when they're creating it in Sugar serum to control whether that um information is displayed uh another example of that could be if there's no discounts being applied don't even show that there are discounted subtotals we can hide different lines depending upon conditions and things like that of course this is all very much customizable with your own company information and this is an example starting point we have um certainly taken other customers uh versions of their quotes the way that they want them to look and started with that as a basis as opposed to this one that's included with the software so we have the ability to create as many uh of these forms as we want um you can have different quote outputs depending on whether you need quotes to appear in different languages so we certainly um have international customers that have appreciated that functionality uh because they can then uh output with the correct currency type as well as the language appearing in the form itself so all very beneficial so that's a look at our proposal output Let's uh head back over here and next up we're going to take a look at some things that affect sales managers so let's take a look at some of the things that are a big part of their world so a big CH challenge for many uh managers is that it is very hard to get a real read on where the organization is at as far as upcoming sales and if you're managing all of that in spreadsheets you are probably well aware of how much time it takes to get all of the members of your team to send in their spreadsheet and then to have someone uh if you're lucky enough to have an administrator uh compile the information into a single report for you um it's there's a lot of time involved and one of the things that's wonderful about having a database as opposed to a non- database is that all of that data entry that's occurring throughout the natural course of the sales process can of course be harnessed without requiring duplication of effort and so then we can output a report just you know based on the um the upkeep of the information that's done as things occur by the sales team itself and so what we'll do here is we'll take a look at how our reports um are going to allow us to have flexible capabilities and me Me by which we can look at our information and Sugar CRM so uh here we have an example of a customized opportunity report and of course you know the the part that everybody loves is the beautiful graph which has these colors and the course as I Mouse over each of the sections it gives me some additional information such as the percentage of the total that each of those is comprising at this time and we have a nice Legend and this is exactly the same thing that you saw embedded here so if we create a nice looking report like that that we want to be able to see in our dashboard uh with a set of filters that we want to be able to see all the time that can easily be done um in this case uh one of the things that's really beneficial though is that we have a lot of detailed information so for example it's helpful to know that I got uh 113k uh in negotiation review stage but what if I want to know more about that well here we have the detail and so as you can see for both of those negotiation uh review uh sales stage deals we have a breakdown for Chris's deals and for Sally's deals and we can see which ones comprise how much uh what the value is and we can add additional columns to this to give us additional helpful information such as the product lines involved uh any number of different data points can be incorporated into a report like this um if we want to expand them all we can do so so for example under the prospecting stage there are 39 total opportunities and then broken out we can see who has the most open uh prospecting stage opportunities so obviously it looks like uh Chris is light on prospecting stage opportunity so that might give us a hint that we need to start funneling more uh new opportunities to him while we've got other folks that are uh quite busy with the ones that they have in front of them so lots of helpful information here and want to point out that this runtime filter capability means that a report doesn't need to be uh created uh 100 different times to give you all the different variable ways that you need to see information about your organization we have the ability to say you know what um I'm not wanting to look at all of my employees uh maybe I want to look at a specific employee and so I could choose a particular employee uh or I could say I want to look at stuff where the expected close date is in the next quarter and uh I can then apply that filter on the Fly whoops let's just take this back to not empty there we go so I can apply my filter and then I will see a revised chart and of course I chose a period in which our data doesn't have any let's try last quarter that might be more uh fun to look at okay that's better so a good deal of the of the the deals but not all uh were were scheduled in the previous quarter so um that gives you sort of a look at that um we could do date ranges you can see how flexible this tool is uh we could give a starting date range um and then an ending date range and again apply and we filter on the Fly and we have our new results right there okay all right so let's take a look at our next slide so consistent process execution is a challenge for pretty much every sales team uh when especially as a team grows uh the idea is to get everybody doing what you have identified are the best practices that are going to help you close the greatest amount of business for your organization and so once once you have identified what those best practices are and one of the things that we've done at Synergy for a number of clients is to help them bring in their top performing salespeople and go through a discussion of the methods and the means that they employ to really succeed at what they're doing and then we try to figure out how we can best adapt what they're doing into a more defined process that we can then replicate with maybe some of the lower or middle performing uh salespersons and bring everybody performance up one of the best ways to do that is to introduce some of the kind of automation that a tool Like Sugar CRM brings to the table so a particular example of this that affects a lot of companies today are that many have gone to a subscription model uh whereas they may have sold uh if they were a software company a one-time license the market has spoken and clients or customers really want to be able to purchase products and services is licensed or subscribed on a periodic basis it really um has emerged as a very popular model for doing business and so what we want to do is make sure that our revenue streams been consistent by making sure that renewals happen timely and one of the things that can really help cut down on the manual effort around that and reduce those missed renewal dates is to employ a process uh automation tool life process author in Sugar CRM and we can really also make sure that the most effective messaging and the most consistent and well-branded and all of that other kind of marketing concern about the way we present our company is all executed with a great deal of consistency so I'd like to take a moment to give you a look at that and you know process author one of its great strengths is this beautiful visual designer that lets us drag and drop elements in uh you know provide plenty of notation about What's happen step and in this very simple example of what it could look like for a renewal sequence you can see that we wait until a a contract end date is coming up and then we uh create a follow-up task for a particular representative and this could be the representative assigned to that account of course and then we look for um what happens uh you know within a certain amount of days with respect to confirming or not confirming a renewal and then we may have additional steps in our sequence such as sending a re a reminder email at 30 days so here we've got something where we've automated the task for a real person to reach out and touch that customer and speak to them about their renewal and here we've got an automated that will be sent as if it came from that renewal rep but it's automatic it's just one of those things that you take uh one of those human factors out out of it and how does that look well we have a lot of control over that so here is an example of an email template and I'm going to kind of Zoom this a little bit because it might be a little bit harder to view but here we can see that we have this wonderful capability of using merge fields and so you know we can bring that into the subject line so it's relevant right away they recognize something that they should know about we here at our company ABC Services appreciate our continued relationship with the customer's account name and of course you can see that we have merged other important information such as the end contract date and when we need them to have committed to their renewal to ensure No Interruption in their service and we can tailor this with uh the individual representative name in the signature if we need to lots of different ways we can do that and of course this is an HTML driven thing so we can open up the HTML and allow you to style this appropriately if you need it but we've also got some helpful styling capability right here uh on coloring and our text and and changing our fonts and hyperlinking and things like that so we've really got a very nicely featured email template Builder and this is the kind of thing that you can utilize uh also in the sales process as well doesn't have to be a renewal uh it could be something such as um reminding someone that their proposal was delivered to them X number of days ago and we want to make sure that they don't have any questions about it and that could be said conditionally such as only if the deal has not closed by a certain date so the amount of that kind of automation is going to vary from one company to the next we don't expect everybody to utilize that same level of automation as I'm suggesting but what we really have here is a tool with virtually infinite possibilities so if um we get the opportunity to work with you on identifying uh the kinds of processes that are well suited to this kind of automation we're going to want to be able to help you uh design and Implement these kinds of flows as part of a Sugar CRM implementation so I'd like to uh after this sort of a brief overview of some of the key uh components of what Sugar CRM can do uh to enhance a sales team's effectiveness you a sort of a summary and a few things uh that I think would be helpful to think about so implementing sugar uh you know with our assistance at Synergy Solutions is designed to uh provide more consistent sales process execution that's what that process author is all about uh we're bringing you powerful reporting uh that doesn't require application of effort in terms of uh compiling spreadsheets and bringing that information from multiple sources it's one tool that everybody's doing their input to and then all of the people who need the output can get it from that tool as well we also have uh you know Wonderful processes uh automation tools and we have uh the ability to really help you implement the best practices of your highest performing sales members so that other team members can benefit from their professional methods in terms of additional advantages uh what we have seen uh for sure as major areas of improvements that have been kind of common themes among clients is the ability to improve their uh handoffs between members of different teams oftentimes in a complex sale we have the involvement of engineering and development teams as well as customer service and support delivery folks uh getting involved as early as the later part of the sales process and certainly the finance department and our ability to help improve Communications between those teams a key points in the process it's based on status changes time lapses things like that have really helped make sure that balls are not getting dropped and that sales are happening in a timely fashion we also have found some really great benefits from proposal automation with e signature tools like docy sign where we can send proposals out of the system via email and actually have them automatically route to additional persons in a signature uh or approval process our Pro our uh process author also includes um approvals uh for management within your company so that if you need a quote to be approved by uh several people before it's allowed to go out of the organization we have a great way to automate that we have also completed several accounting Integrations most notable QuickBooks which you know so many of our customers are uh using these days um and we also have a fantastic customer portal um capability there's not just the support portal that Sugar CRM has developed includes the sugar Enterprise but we've built customer portals that are completely from the Grand at custom we have a great framework that we've developed for that um and it has been extremely successful so that is another thing that we uh as Synergy have built and then of course we have a complete mobile experience which is constantly improving um you know sugar puts out a new update to the mobile app I think it's at least once a month now and so they're they're all always adding more uh capabilities that people want and they take a lot of customer feedback into account in that feature uh development so that's really the thumb of our presentation today I I realize that you know many of you probably if uh you're considering CRM for your organization now uh for the first time will probably have additional questions that you'd love to have answered and I would just like to invite you to please reach out and uh let me know know if that is is your case um we would love to set up a private demonstration for you where we cover just your questions so that you have plenty of time uh to get those answered and so uh you know please do uh feel free to make note of the contact information you have on your screen we'll be happy to follow up with um anybody who attended today's presentation and just get your feedback if that's something that you would like to do and so we thank you very much again uh from myself and Lawrence at Sugar CRM for taking the time out of your day to attend today's presentation we will be making this available uh on the web by a recording and we'll be uploading it uh for you here pretty shortly so again thanks everybody and hope you've enjoyed our presentation and we look forward to talking to you soon