It is estimated that sales representatives spend only around 20% of their time selling and also almost an equal amount of time on administrative tasks. So, is it possible that the time spent on administrative tasks is minimized and the time thus saved is diverted to selling activities? The answer is Yes! Latest technologies employed in SAP CRM lets sales professionals save on the time they spend on administrative tasks.
Typically, sales professionals are handling multiple opportunities at any given point in time and keeping track of changes in all their opportunities can be a time consuming task. In order help sales professionals on this aspect, SAP CRM’s pipeline change view of pipeline performance management is build to identify and monitor changes in the pipeline.
In sales pipeline change view, one can track changes to the key opportunity parameters in one’s pipeline. The changes can be tracked over any time scale. A sales representative can track changes to the opportunities in his / her pipeline where as a sales manager can track changes to the opportunities of his / her entire team. The changed opportunities are listed with the most relevant details, such as the prospect name, the sales stage in which the opportunity is, and the progress that the opportunity is making, for example. While the tabular view offers the summary of changes in the pipeline, the briefing card lets you get a more detailed view of an opportunity.
Sales pipeline change view lets you track changes both at the overall opportunity level and at the opportunity products level.
At the overall opportunity level, one can monitor changes to the sales stage, expected sales volume, closing date, and progress. The system not only tracks the changes, but also shows the direction of change. A positive change is represented by an upward arrow on the field and a negative change is represented by the downward arrow. One can find out the previous value, who changed it and when it was changed by placing the mouse over the arrow mark.
The progress is measured in the number of days that an opportunity spends in one sales stage. If an opportunity has spent more time than intended in a particular stage, the progress is set to “stalled”, so that an immediate corrective action can be triggered.
In addition to monitoring whether sales representatives are following up individual opportunities through the sales pipeline, sales managers can also determine whether each opportunity is being rushed through the pipeline. One can manage this by making a speed status setting, which allows the setting of the minimum length of time that an opportunity should spend in one specific sales stage. This enables sales managers to determine whether some of the sales representatives are skipping out specific sales stages, such as demonstrations at customer sites, in an effort to hurry the sales process along.
Thus SAP CRM helps tracking of changes to a pipeline very easy, thereby freeing up sales professionals time which can be utilized for customer facing activities.
