From first contact with prospective customers to staying on top of their relationship and analyzing their success, salespeople use a multitude of tools. The use of NoCode in sales can be a powerful tool for managing and automating the entire sales process.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is one of the most important tools for salespeople. Sales is usually a numbers game, and they need to track and maintain each lead with care.
Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) tools can shorten sales cycles by helping salespeople quickly generate quotes for a group of items or services. A salesperson’s responsibility does not end until a contract is signed. Creating proposal documents, contracts, and having the customer sign them is usually the salesperson’s responsibility. Some CPQ tools also offer document generation and management capabilities to make this process easier. Integrating CPQ capabilities into CRM tools can also be very useful in reducing overall system friction and keeping everything in a centralized location.
Another important tool salespeople use to make their life easier is data analysis and reporting software. These tools help them analyze large datasets and identify potential prospects to target. These tools can also be used to analyze company-wide existing sales and prospect data to create sales reports for management.
Communication and presentation tools like online chat and video conferencing platforms represent the final piece of the spectrum. These tools are widely used for contacting clients or coordinating with the rest of the team.
Existing software and tools for reporting and communication are already very flexible so will be excluded from the scope of NoCode usage.
What Salespeople Need Beyond Traditional CRM Systems
A CRM helps you keep track of existing customers, improve customer retention, and automate communication. However, it is rather difficult to manage a sophisticated sales or quoting process, run complex calculations, or generate customized documents with traditional CRM systems.
CPQ systems become important when the business reaches a point where generating quotes is taking more time than the sales team could spend on more profitable activities.
Most salespeople earn majority of their income through commissions. Subsequently, they do not want to spend their time going through different tools to generate quotes or prepare sales proposals. They want to spend their time communicating with prospects and negotiating sales. Therefore, any automation that can help them minimize the time they spend on things other than selling, is an improvement for the overall sales process.
A disjointed CPQ and CRM system means that the salespeople must create and maintain their leads in the CRM platform, then go to the CPQ tool to generate pricing, and then go back to the CRM. This approach will cost salespeople time, while also increasing the odds of making mistakes.
Some CRM systems include basic CPQ features. However, these are typically limited to simpler processes and despite this, those systems can still be costly beyond the means of many startups and SMBs.
How to Use NoCode in Sales?
Introduction of NoCode in sales means that companies with a highly specific sales processes can automate the entire sales process and build a bespoke CRM system on their own.
Selling complex products and services usually requires pricing with relatively complex calculations and rules. There are so many factors that contribute to calculating the price such as product configurations and options, discounting based on volume, locale, existing relationships with a client, market specific pricing adjustments, and more. It can be fairly challenging to incorporate each of these factors when generating a quote inside your CRM.
It is important that the business offers consistent pricing, and all salespeople follow those pricing rules. To alleviate this problem, most businesses develop quoting tools for these purposes often use the oldest NoCode platform: Excel. However, if salespeople need to generate a quote by entering the same information across multiple systems, they are more likely to waste time and make mistakes.
Another challenge CRM users face is producing a proposal document that can be presented to the client. These documents (typically a PDF) incorporate all cost factors as well as other content, such as legal language and type of product or service offered.
Modern CRM systems offer many features and capabilities. However, most businesses only use a small fraction of such capabilities. Hence, businesses can utilize NoCode in sales processes to build completely custom CRM systems based on their own sales process, including quoting calculations and proposal generation. They can further complement their use of existing CRM platforms by using NoCode integration tools.
For those companies that are happy with their CRM systems, they can still build their own integrations sine most CRM systems come with open APIs. In other words, it would be possible to write code to integrate a custom quoting calculation with a CRM system like SalesForce. However, this still means writing code which also means that you need to hire a team of developers.
You can use NoCode platforms to integrate your own custom quoting calculations with a traditional CRM system. This may not be as efficient as writing your own code, but it can be a cost effective alternative. As NoCode platforms advance, these types of integration possibilities will also improve.
