Telemarketing Software Featured Article

When it comes to effective outbound telemarketing, customer relationship management (CRM) has a huge role to play. Used effectively, CRM can be the engine that drives telemarketing efforts, and it can turn lukewarm campaigns into hot ones.

Getting the CRM right in order to drive an outbound campaign, however, is a process that has a lot of moving parts. Sales organizations need to ensure they have a robust CRM solution in place, and (perhaps more importantly), they need to ensure that sales teams are actually using the solution. At many organizations, sales employee use of CRM is often low, and an underutilized CRM program is not going to offer much help.

Thanks to social media and the Web plus multichannel contact centers, information vital to an outbound campaign is spread out in many places, and manual processes for research before a campaign simply won’t cut it anymore, no matter how much effort a salesperson puts into his “we’ve always done it this way” processes.

To help span the gap between the CRM system and effective outbound selling, many sales automation solutions providers offer products that can help ensure sales teams are using CRM effectively.

Earlier this week, CBIG Consulting announced the rollout of its CBIG CRM analytics service solution. The product is a combination of analytics and visualization tools designed to give a best-practices boost to CRM applications, helping enterprises maximize value from their current and untapped customers, said the company.

"Many of our customers come to us because they know how to use Salesforce, but they don't know how to use Salesforce to discover strategic insights about their customers,” said CBIG Consulting spokesman Don Arendarczyk.

Solutions such as those from CBIG and others are designed to help integrate CRM intelligence with back office, cloud-based, and social media data to create actionable data visualizations. It’s a way to unite data across all departments involved in the selling process (which is nearly every department of a company) so that efforts are not wasted or duplicated and sales professionals are reaching out to the leads most likely to turn into sales.

“A sales-focused CRM should remove the administrative efforts and automate workflows to make your reps selling machines,” according to sales automation solutions provider VanillaSoft.

If sales personnel are spending all their time wrestling with an ineffective CRM program, they’re wasting valuable time that could be spent selling.