As your business grows, you either manage sales yourself or have a small team handling too many deals, you know
the scenario.

Your day is spent chasing down follow-ups, wading through your inbox to find an email exchange, or updating an Excel spreadsheet, all while trying to close more deals.

A powerful CRM doesn’t just keep your contacts organized; it gives you back those valuable hours you’re currently losing.

At Atto Infotech, we’ve worked with countless businesses, and we can see the reality: the issue isn’t a lack of effort. Your team is working hard. The problem is that manual sales processes silently steal time and resources that could otherwise be directed towards building relationships and closing deals.

Here’s exactly where those hours are lost, and how a CRM recaptures them:

The invisible time-suck in your manual sales process

Before we dive into the solution, let’s be brutally honest about the problem.

According to studies, salespeople spend roughly 64% of their time on activities that don’t involve directly selling. This includes tasks such as logging notes, sending follow-up emails, searching through contacts, scheduling calls, and reporting to upper management.

A CRM hugely tackles this.

1. Automated follow-up saves 2-3 hours per weekYou likely already know what this one is: a prospect that doesn’t convert because the follow-up never happened. When you have 30 or 40 leads at once, this is not an unlikely scenario.With a CRM, you can set up automated follow-up sequences. This means every lead receives the appropriate communication at the correct time, without your team having to do anything manually.

   These sequences will typically save a salesperson two to three hours a week and will ensure that not a single lead slips through the cracks.

2. Centralized contact history saves 1-2 hours per week
   How much time do your salespeople spend searching for context right before a call?Scouring their email history, looking for call notes, or worst of all approaching a colleague for a recap of the previous conversation?This minor irritation really adds up.

   A CRM centralizes all communications, emails, call logs, notes from previous conversations, in one single location.

   Your salesperson can then look at a prospect’s complete history before picking up the phone to call them, and their calls are not only much more effective, but more personal as well.

3. Pipeline visibility eliminates useless meetings
   When your leadership team lacks a clear understanding of the sales pipeline, numerous team update meetings will occur that are completely avoidable.These meetings always require someone to put together a report and present it, and typically result in more follow-up questions, clarifications, and corrections from the manager.A CRM provides your leadership with an up-to the minute view of the pipeline.

   All information about each deal stage, expected close date, potential value, and team activities is instantly available in the system.

   This removes typically 1-2 update meetings from your week, and saves a manager 2 or more hours of reporting time.

4. Task & Reminder automation saves 1 hour per week
   When trying to keep up with sales leads, salespeople are likely to be mentally juggling dozens of individual tasks, all of which have various deadlines.It is mentally taxing to be thinking about follow-ups that are due next Thursday, a proposal that needs to be sent by the end of the week, or checking in with a particular client next month.All of these items are easily missed, particularly when they are scattered across sticky notes and to-do apps.

   A CRM allows your salespeople to automate tasks, and it sends them reminders, so that there’s always something they can be focusing on.

   You take all the cognitive load of simply trying to remember what needs to be done, and replace it with the more profitable task of actually doing it.

5. Self-populating reports save 2 hours per week
   Generating end-of-week sales reports, monthly sales performance reviews, or pipeline forecasts is time-consuming and tedious to do on a manual basis.These processes involve pulling data from spreadsheets, formatting, and then cross-referencing all the information before you are done.This time can often be spent on the last working day of the week.

   A CRM allows users to build themselves.

   You simply select what you would like the reports to contain, and your system is automatically updated to display this data.

   What could have taken two hours of work previously can now take you two minutes.

   Real ROI for founders overseeing sales

   If you are the founder in charge of your sales efforts, these figures need to be carefully considered.

   Saving 10 hours a week for each member of your sales team translates to $300 dollars saved per person per week (assuming a $30 per hour salary for each salesperson).

   If you have five salespeople on your team, that’s an annual savings of over $78,000, and this figure doesn’t even account for additional sales from lost leads that would otherwise slip through the cracks.

   Your sales team is never replaced by a CRM system; it is augmented to ensure that your staff is spending their time most efficiently on closing business.

   Looking to save those hours?

   The experienced team at Atto Infotech can assist your business by implementing a CRM system that can adapt to your existing work processes, rather than the other way around.

   If you feel your sales processes are costly in terms of your time and the hours that are going unused, speak with us today to learn about how the right CRM solution could transform your business.