Picture this. You are a big organization’s owner with a large customer base and numerous sales channels. What would be your first approach to manage them? You obviously wouldn't want to start your day by swamping yourself with compiling scattered sales data. Neither would you want to open those exhausting big spreadsheets to analyze individual sales reps’ data to track progress or call or email them.
Instead, you would want to see all your data in one location in a well-arranged manner to facilitate the management. This is exactly where a web sales portal comes into the picture. Several organizations use a web sales portal to manage their different sales operations, channels, leads, and customers. A sales management portal helps them streamline their sales operations and makes it easy for them to track sales progress.
Before further details of how a web sales portal works and how it helps overcome various sales challenges, it’s essential to understand what a sales portal exactly is.
In simple terms, a sales portal is a centralized digital repository that stores information about customers, leads, sales figures, etc. It also provides sales executives with the tools and assets they need to close more deals. A good sales portal also harbors content that can engage prospects and bring them down towards the bottom of your sales funnel. Typically, the types of content you find in a web sales portal are pitch decks, webinars, video testimonials, PDF case studies, FAQs, eBooks, whitepapers, etc.
Over time, the concept of a web sales portal has changed, and it is no longer a log of sales figures, leads, and customers. Rather, it has grown into a smart, dynamic, and collaborative content ecosystem. It helps an organization help customers at different levels of their buyer’s journey, track, target, and re-target them.
All in all, a web sales portal is the need of the hour. Every organization looking to revamp its sales management must integrate a feature-rich sales portal to enhance efficiency and revenue.
Sales Challenges and How a Sales Portal Can Surmount Them
1. Managing Multiple Sales Executives’ Data
Challenge - As the owner or a sales manager of a company, you have a lot to do. You can easily manage a few sales reps spread across different territories in the initial phase of your business. However, it may grow tough as your business grows. When your territories expand, more sales reps join your organization, customers and sales go high in number, things can turn tricky.
Traditional methods like maintaining big registers or semi-traditional methods like using bulky spreadsheets no longer suffice. Issues like errors in entries, more time and effort to compile and analyze sales data, poor visibility, etc., slow down the process. This may lead to a decrease in the overall efficiency of your sales operations.
Solution with a Sales Portal
This is where a web sales portal comes in handy. It centralizes all your sales reps’ data in one location and gives you a bird’s eye view of it all. You no longer need to wade through those big registers or spreadsheets to view individual sales reps’ data. You don’t even need to ask your sales reps about their daily progress at the end of the day.
A sales portal does it all for you. By providing each sales rep with their secure account, you can enable them to enter and fetch sales figures. All you need to do is analyze the data your reps enter, build further strategies accordingly, and guide your reps to follow them.
It also saves you and your sales reps the hassle of connecting over a phone or exchanging text messages to know sales progress. You don’t need to collect and compile sales data your reps send via text messages, emails, WhatsApp, or any other medium. You can simply log in to the web sales portal and view a centralized collection of all the data your different sales reps enter. You can also filter data by sales reps’ names, date range, location, etc., to view what you want.
2. Tracking Leads and Customers across Different Channels
Challenge - A customer places an order on your website. Another customer orders something from a marketplace where you’ve listed your products. Yet another customer calls you to book an order and makes payment online. Isn’t it starting to sound too much to handle separately? Now you can easily imagine how difficult and time-consuming it would be to continue this process for 1000 orders a day. Would you want to go ahead with this approach of tracking orders or leads, or other events across separate channels? You wouldn’t.
Solution with a Sales Portal
A web sales portal is for these situations only. With an increasing number of daily leads and customers across different channels, individual channel-wise tracking becomes cumbersome. It brings the incoming orders, leads’ contact forms, inquiries, or any other detail under one roof.
You can simply log in and get an exhaustive view of all the orders, leads, and inquiries across multiple channels right from within your portal. This helps make their tracking easier and reduces the chances of errors like duplicate, wrong, or missing entries. This also helps boost the overall efficiency of your sales processes.
3. Sharing Information Internally
Challenge - There is a need to share documents among different departments and within the same department at various stages. Sharing information helps get what a department or an employee wants to view or use for some operation.
For instance, if a sales rep wants to give a demo to a new lead, they might need to contact the owner or sales manager to share the demo. This may take time if the owner is busy and leads to missing out on instant closing of deals if the demo goes well. What may happen afterward is that potential prospects or leads may get better deals somewhere else sometimes. This results in the loss of instant sales opportunities just due to lack of instant sharing of the demo which can directly impact your bottom line.
Solution with a Sales Portal
Any sales rep can log in to the portal and access demo videos of products to show to the new leads. This helps prevent any probable delays in exchanging product demos or other explanatory material and loss of leads.
Are you also looking to overcome any such sales challenge? Our web sales portal can help you streamline your sales management. It is a ready-to-integrate portal that you can customize as per your requirements as well.
4. Manage Lead Data and Follow-Ups
Challenge - If you don’t have an efficient method to manage leads, you are sure to lose out on some heavyweight customers. The challenge arises when you don’t have a centralized system to track these leads and follow-up on them to engage and convert them. Without a proper follow-up and management system, these leads can’t reach the bottom of the sales funnel.
Solution
A sales portal helps overcome the challenge of lead management by giving you a complete view of all the leads across different channels compiled together. Details of all the leads and prospects that fill in contact forms, request your product demo, or subscribe to your newsletter, etc., are accessible on the go. This reduces your time to view and analyze the progress of your leads. It also helps you think of follow-up strategies to re-engage cold leads and boost sales.
5. Manage Multiple Business Partners
Challenge - When you have multiple sales partners as your stakeholders, the management can get tough. You can sometimes fail to get clear visibility of the progress of the sales of each channel partner over a long period. This may eventually lead to a stage where continuing business with the sales partner is no longer an economically viable option. These kinds of dissociations with partners or incidences of poor performance and visibility can hamper your business.
Solution
A web sales portal helps you reduce the issues of tracking and analyzing individual channel partners’ performance. All your sales partners can simply feed their daily progress into your portal via secure log-in.
They need not call, email, or fax you the sales progress report every week or month. It also helps you get real-time access to their progress and analyze it through sales figures and other performance parameters. It can also help you catch any discrepancies, signs of poor performance, or other issues before they escalate. Accordingly, you can think of a plan to bring everything back on track to prevent further loss.
CRMJetty - Your Best Sales Web Portal Development Companion
Now that you have a clear understanding of how a web sales portal can help you bring efficiency to your sales processes, it is high time you also integrated one. CRMJetty can be the right development partner for your sales portal. We provide a ready-to-integrate customizable portal for your sales management. It is a feature-rich sales management portal that comes with high scalability and freedom of customization. You can customize its features or request customization to fit your business logic.
Apart from offering ready-to-integrate sales portal software solutions, we also offer custom development services. If you need it, our certified portal development team can build a sales portal from scratch purely for your business. For that, our developers gather requirements, analyze them, discuss them with you, and create a development roadmap. Once they start developing it, they also make sure that you stay abreast of the development progress through iterative updates. Once they finish it, our QA team tests it to find out if it is ready to enter the market. After our QA team gives the final nod, the portal becomes all yours.
You can also get our developers’ support in understanding the features and getting familiar with the portal for a limited time. Our marketing team can also guide you to promote your portal to get more customers to use it.
We are ready to collaborate with you to build an all-powerful web sales portal, are you? If yes, let’s get in touch and work magic together.
Source : https://www.crmjetty.com/blog/web-sales-portal-way-modernize-sales-management/
