I wish I had superpowers, said the sales rep after a long day at the office. A desire shared by many other sales professionals, according to research conducted by Denis Pombriant from the Beagle Research Group, LLC. In his study “Getting Past the Breaking Point of Yesterday’s CRM,” Pombriant presents six superpowers that 98% of sellers wish they had:

• Predicting the future
• Having a perfect memory
• Having a super-focus
• Knowing a prospect’s mood
• Being super organized
• Reading their sales managers’ mind

Such a desire has a fundamental cause: selling is a complex task. It demands time for preparation, interaction, follow-up and data logging. It requests training, retraining and innovation. And all this happens under processes, rules, laws and regulations, in a time of constant changes in the customers’ needs and behaviour.

So, how can a sales rep obtain those desired superpowers and become superheroes?

Many companies think they have the answer: CRM – Customer Relationship Management.

However, when the same sales professionals, who desire to have superpowers, talked about CRM platforms, they were clear; their companies’ CRM is a kind of kryptonite, as you can see in the following numbers:

• 85% of sellers admit having made potentially embarrassing mistakes due to faulty CRM data.
• 47% of them consider CRM a go-to tool.
• 42% of sellers say they have been ghosted by prospects because the competition got them first with a better offer

If the pressure coming from quota achievement, competition and deadlines were not hard enough to deal with, and a tool that was supposed to help with sales development just added insult to injury.

However, even though many sales professionals are unsatisfied with their CRM platforms, there is still light at the end of the tunnel. CRM is usually misunderstood and poorly implemented. It means companies are looking in the wrong direction when deciding which CRM system to buy and how to insert it in their sales and marketing routines and vice versa.

CRM can increase sales performance and offer the superpowers that your sales team needs. It is just a matter of having the right CRM.

What is the right CRM?

Prombriant’s recommendation in the last chapter of his research may help you:

“Today’s cloud-based platform technology makes it possible to tightly integrate disparate systems like AI, machine learning, proposal generation, next best action/offer, and much more.

The resulting systems are far more resilient to change than those of a few years ago because they are based on platforms that generate running code. Generation from specifications provides a level of flexibility that drives business agility—the thing that systems of record can’t produce and that businesses desperately need.

Lastly, modern platform-based systems present the possibility that an organization employing them will not find itself stuck with customer-facing systems that do not evolve, as is currently the case.”

Therefore, the right CRM is a modern cloud solution that facilitates data entry, predict behaviour and results, keep the information up to date, organize and prioritize tasks, and enhance communication and collaboration.

That is the reason VBS offers Zoho, the ultimate modern Cloud-based CRM solution that is going to provide superpowers to your sales team.

Whether you are collecting customer data, writing a document, or just looking for some sales numbers, Zoho provides the so desired superpowers to the sales professionals in your organization.

Zoho is the ultimate CRM solution due to a variety of Apps and the recent AI-powered assistant, Zia.

Who’s Zia?

Zia is an AI companion within Zoho CRM, and she is here to help you manage your CRM intelligently. Zia can fetch the information you want, take notes as you dictate, predict the outcome of sales activities, detect anomalies, automate mundane tasks, and more!