Posted in: Efficiency, LinkPoint Connect, Productivity
Integrating email with your CRM software can save you a lot of time and money — both in direct savings and in heading off unnecessary spending. Find out more about how LinkPoint Connect can drive cost savings for your business below.
Minimize Duplicate Work
Email may be a tried-and-true sales and customer service tool, but traditional email is also siloed. One salesperson or CSR emailing a customer can limit the information to that interaction unless it’s recorded somewhere all stakeholders can see it.
Consider this scenario: A sales person works with a lead via email. That sales person then goes on leave, and the lead is handed off to another sales person. Does all that previous communication go out the window? Obviously, that would be a huge waste of resources and lead to duplicate work. It might also be frustrating for the lead to explain their needs all over again.
One option is to have the sales teams record all their interactions. But copy-pasting email information or writing up notes about lead interactions can be time-consuming. Chances are people will start taking short cuts, which can lead to lackluster notes or no notes at all.
LinkPoint Connect lets sales and other teams automatically record emails into CRM systems. This reduces all that duplicate work, which saves your staff time and potentially saves you money in labor costs.
Streamline Communications
Email integration helps streamline communications without adding burdens to your staff. It’s easy for everyone to record important emails, which ensures your teams are on the same page. This reduces costs in several ways, as it:
- Stops various team members from spending time chasing the same information
- Reduces confusion with clients or customers, leading to extra work or slower times to close deals
- Enhances the way clients and customers perceive the organization and professionalism of your teams, which can lead to increased revenues
The Daisy Foundation put LinkPoint Connect to work for their processes, which involve touchpoints with thousands of contacts. The integration with Salesforce drove efficiencies and cost-savings for the company. One winning factor was the prominent placement of the Record to Salesforce button, which reminds team members to record and share important information during the completion of the task itself. This creates much more compliance than asking people to record communication information manually after the fact.
Healthx, a cloud-based health care payer platform, also leveraged LinkPoint Connect for efficiency wins. It used the integration to simplify a complicated CRM process that a lot of duplicate data-entry work previously supported. Now, staff is freed to handle customer and sales-facing tasks, but the data in the CRM for each account is more robust than ever.
Reduce Customer Service Issues
Customer service issues are costly. If they’re not solved, you can lose out on future revenue from that customer and potentially others because of poor word-of-mouth. Solving them also costs money — Gartner estimates that every instance of live chat or email contact costs businesses around $8.
In the big picture, $8 is nothing compared to the return you get from a happy customer. But consider the ramifications of unnecessary points of contact: They, too, cost $8 each on average.
If your CRMs and sales staff handled 1,000 touchpoints per month, that’s $8,000. Now, imagine you have a 50% repeat rate, where staff are overworking each other or dealing with customer contacts multiple times to get anything resolved because one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing. That 50% repeat contact rate costs $4,000 you didn’t need to pay for.
When you integrate email into your CRM, staff is easily able to see what other people have communicated to a customer. That helps them solve issues faster (and with fewer touchpoints) or head off issues altogether. Add up the cost savings over thousands of touchpoints and an entire year, and it can be a large number.
Maximize Time to Pursue Leads
This one is less about saving money and more about using your resources to drive the highest ROI possible. If your sales staff is constantly burdened with administrative tasks, they’re not chasing leads and working to convert prospects. That means lost revenue in the future.
Without an integrated email system, though, sales staff has to engage in a lot of administrative work. They’re always updating someone on the current state of a lead or account, doubling back to figure out what’s going on with a lead, or summarizing the latest sales call or email communication in the CRM.
On average, sales staff report spending almost two-thirds of their work time on non-selling tasks. That’s costing you money — and possibly costing you the best sales people. In many cases, sales personnel thrive when they can maximize their earnings by doing what they’re good at — selling. They’re not earning money (or much money) when they’re summarizing email content in a CRM or trying to get others on the phone to hear what’s happening with an account. If your sales staff isn’t able to meet sales goals because admin time is holding them back, they might leave. And that can cost you money in both hiring new staff and lost revenue in the meantime.
Sprague — an energy and materials handling company — used email integration and LinkPoint Connect to solve this very issue. By connecting Outlook and Salesforce in a more efficient manner that allows auto-recording of emails, the teams freed up sales time.
“The reps have more time to pursue more sales because it’s so much more efficient,” said the Director of Marketing and Customer Experience for Sprague.
Enhance Accountability
Even the best, most dedicated employees have their own motivations and personal responsibilities, which means your business goals aren’t always first and foremost for them. That doesn’t mean they’re purposefully doing anything wrong or costing you extra money willfully. It does mean someone needs to have oversight for all processes.
Plus, when sales and customer service supervisors and leaders are able to see the overall trends and what’s going on with leads and clients, they can step in to help solve problems or provide the right resources proactively. That helps everyone be more efficient and productive, supports the team as a whole, and ensures staff knows they have backup as they work to close deals or solve customer challenges. And all of that works together to improve your bottom line.
See the Benefits for Yourself
Not sure how LinkPoint Connect might save your business time and money? Check out our list of case studies. You might find a story about a company solving a challenge very similar to yours.
You can also contact us today to speak with a rep about solutions for your business. Ask for a free live demo to see email recording, calendar syncing, meeting tools and other features in action, or click the Free Trial button to find out how to start a free 14-day trial of the full version of LinkPoint Connect. You can put all of these features to the test yourself and get input from internal stakeholders about whether the integration will save you time and money in the future.
