SugarCRM Hint – Save Time, Be Prepared
One of the perks of my job is that I get to review a lot of interesting survey data from both the CRM industry at large and our own customer base as well. I recently read a stat, from a survey of 400 sales executives, that said 72% of sales professionals spend 30 minutes or more preparing for a meeting with a new prospect, while nearly half (49%) spend at least 45 minutes preparing.
At first glance, 30-45 minutes of prep might not seem out of the ordinary, but when you must pursue multiple sales opportunities each day, the prep time really starts to add up and affects your ability to reach build business relationships with enough contacts. Furthermore, much of the prep work is spent manually searching publicly available data on the Web. The top five destinations to gather information about new business contacts according to the survey respondents are:
LinkedIn Profiles – 64%
The company website of their contact – 63%
Google search of their name – 61%
Facebook profiles – 51%
Twitter accounts – 35%
In many cases, sales professionals visit these sites multiples times as they piece together background information, build a holistic customer profile and prepare talking points for an upcoming meeting. So, it starts to make sense why the data gathering phase is so important and why it takes up so much time of every day.
Enter SugarCRM Hint, our new relationship intelligence service. Hint helps you minimize the time you spend on research, administrative, and record maintenance activities. It eliminates the hassle of manually going to the websites and social platforms above. Instead, users provide a name and email address for an individual and Hint automatically searches, tunes, and inputs the rest of the personal and corporate profile details for that contact. Hint does the work for Sugar users by gathering and analyzing customer intelligence from a broad range of social data sources so users can quickly and efficiently learn more about their prospects to establish a productive relationship.
And, if you’re using a demand generation tool like Act-On or Marketo, Hint can help better qualify leads coming from form fills. With one simple click, you can add valuable information for your prospecting and lead qualification teams, shaving valuable minutes or even days off of the lead-to-close cycle.
According to a report by Nucleus Research, “Hint can significantly increase salespeople’s productivity.” The research firm conducted its own survey of salespeople, crunched the numbers and found that, “Hint could save an average of 17 minutes per lead, delivering payback in less than a month based on just two calls.”
That’s a powerful statement – one that I hope you’ll help us test. To explore Hint and see if it saves your organization time and delivers more accurate data, sign up for a free 30 day evaluation.