Negosentro | 6 Important Kinds of Sales Software | Modern businesses thrive when they can leverage software to streamline and expedite workflows. While much of the heavy lifting for sales is still performed by sales representatives, these employees can still supplement their work with various software tools. Here are six important kinds of sales software.
1. Customer Relationship Managers
Whether you’re looking for a CRM for small business or for large corporations, CRMs are incredibly beneficial software systems to use. CRMs help you keep track of information and processes that have to do with your customers. You can manage lists of existing customers and your interactions with them, streamline your sales funnels and organize events and files that have to do with your customers. These features enable you to keep your customer relations organized and help your sales representatives find information and interact with customers more easily.
2. Point-of-Sales (POS) Systems
The main use of a POS system is to act as a payment processing station for your customers, but many of them also contain programs such as CRMs, employee management and inventory tracking. The main benefit of a POS system is to streamline processes and collect transaction data. A POS system can help your sales representatives or cashiers process transactions more quickly. It also keeps records of transactions for use later in insight and analytics procedures. POS software is also highly customizable. There are options in all physical and digital sizes from apps and card reader attachments for mobile devices to large computer systems.
3. Inventory Managers
Inventory managers are uniquely useful for sales departments because they ensure you can easily manage and track your inventory. These platforms include features for monitoring amounts of each product in your inventory, including how much is being produced daily, how much is being stored and how much is being sold. With the automation of this information, you can more swiftly monitor inventory data, such as how well certain items are selling, and more accurately predict future inventory needs.
4. Project Management Systems
Project management systems are useful across your organization and their features are equally helpful in sales departments. These programs help keep track of project timelines and milestones, ensuring your team stays on track to project completion and is able to adjust due dates if necessary. With a project management system, your sales projects will be better organized and it will be much clearer who is working on which project and in what capacity.
5. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems
ERPs are basically organization-wide databases. Also called enterprise software, these systems enable you to centralize your company’s information, data and files. This way, there is one overarching database covering customer information, sales records, revenue calculations and other information. Employees from various departments, who have the appropriate credentials, can access this information and save changes to it in one place. Then, the information is able to be referred to, accessed and edited more easily and quickly because employees will know exactly where it’s supposed to be stored.
6. Productivity Software
While these software options may seem less sales-specific, they are still integral to supporting sales. Word processors, presentation software and organizational software like spreadsheet programs are all necessary components of any business’s departments, including sales. Word processors allow for content written in them to be saved to whatever database your sales team uses, so they can be accessed by others with the appropriate credentials. Having a presentation program makes it easier to store presentations in that same database for future reference. Spreadsheet programs make it far simpler to create equations, tables, graphs and templates for sales and accounting departments to record and analyze sales revenue and budgets.
The type of software you choose to use really depends on the size of your sales department and what products or services you sell. If you can, it can be a good idea to find a system that incorporates some or all of these software options so you can customize without spending time and resources setting up multiple systems.
