Introduction 

A sales process is all about finding the right customers, selling products and services, and retaining them. Every company’s sales process is unique, but the ultimate goal of all companies is to sell. 

The Vtiger CRM sales process consists of the following steps:

1. Lead generation
2. Lead qualification
3. Follow-up
4. Deal management

Vtiger CRM simplifies your sales process by providing the right kind of sales tools. Starting with generating leads to making a sale, let us look at Vtiger’s features that can help you manage sales effortlessly.

Lead Generation

Generating leads is the first step in the sales process. With Vtiger CRM, you can generate leads through webforms, emails, and phone calls.

• Webforms: Most companies use webforms to capture their website visitors’ details, which they use to convert visitors into customers. When a visitor submits a webform, Vtiger CRM automatically captures their details into a lead record. 

• Emails and Phone Calls: Sending emails is another way of prospecting. With Vtiger CRM, you can create reusable email templates and capture your leads’ attention by personalizing the emails you send them. You can also trigger automated responses with autoresponder email campaigns based on the actions that your leads take on your emails. 

• Social Media: Automate lead capturing from your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts and automatically store lead data on the CRM. All you need to do is sync your Facebook Business Account with Vtiger CRM and get lead information via Facebook Lead Forms. Also, you can use Vtiger Enrich to capture information about leads, such as their name, organization name, title, education, skills, etc., and store it in a CRM record.

All the leads that you generate at this stage are Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) - the leads that your marketing team considers likely to convert.  After you generate leads, you must qualify them for sales. 

Lead Qualification 

A lead is a potential customer. Lead qualification is the process of evaluating a lead’s willingness to buy, and qualified leads move further along the sales process. Vtiger CRM offers the Lead Score and Engagement Score features to help you identify the right leads so that you chase the ones that are more likely to convert. 

• Lead Scoring: When you create a lead or a contact in Vtiger CRM, a profile score is defined for them. The score is based on criteria such as contact title, lead source, etc., which are fields in the Leads/Contacts module. Vtiger CRM sets up the criteria by default but you can always customize them to your needs. When you set up the criteria, Vtiger CRM automatically calculates and generates the profile score in the form of a star rating. The maximum rating is 5-stars. Leads with the highest rating are considered more likely to buy from you. You must focus more on such leads because chances are they will convert faster than the others.
• Engagement Scoring: Another way of scoring leads in Vtiger CRM is based on their interactions with you (sales team). Every time a lead engages with you, their engagement score is incremented by one. For example, when a lead opens your email, the engagement score increases by one point. When they download a document that you shared, the score becomes two, and so on. Higher the engagement score, the more the chances of conversion.

Follow-Up

Now, what are the ways you can get in touch with your leads? Vtiger CRM provides you with options.

• Appointment Pages: Get a ready-made schedule of your day, week, or month and share it with your leads. Appointment pages consider your meetings and appointments to generate your schedule. Slots that are already books are ignored. Your leads can see your available time slots and pick the best time to talk to you. 
• Email Sequences: The Email Sequences feature is a part of sales automation. It lets you configure the sequence of emails to send to your leads. The aim is to get your leads closer to your offer. Using this feature, you can, 
  • Configure all the emails you want to send (you can have a maximum of five emails in a sequence).
  • Choose what actions a lead must perform on an email to trigger the subsequent email. 
• Email and SMS Campaigns: Send out marketing emails and SMS messages with Vtiger CRM’s Email Campaigns and SMS Campaigns. You can use pre-defined email templates to curate personalized email campaigns as well as improve readability. Besides, you get insights into the recipients’ engagement with your emails in terms of opens, clicks, and downloads. 
• Phone Calls: Pick a phone service provider, configure a phone number, and set it as default to make calls from the CRM.  You can even create a deal during an ongoing call if the prospect shows interest in buying.

When all goes well, a lead is converted into a Sales Qualified Lead. That is when your sales team must create a deal and further the process of making a sale.

Deal Management

In the process of converting leads into paying customers, you create deals. A deal is an opportunity to sell. It goes through a series of sales stages before a sale is made.

• Sales Pipelines: Vtiger CRM provides you with a default pipeline called the Standard pipeline. By default, your lead can be in one of the following stages -
  • New
  • Qualifying
  • Requirements Gathering
  • Value Proposition
  • Negotiation
  • Ready to Close
  • Closed Won
  • Closed Lost
  • Dormant

• Deals: Create a deal when you sales-qualify a lead. A deal’s related contacts, organization, quotes, and other information are available under One View. Furthermore, every sales stage of a deal is associated with a set of journey tasks. The deal will progress to the next stage only when sales reps perform all the tasks in the current stage. Also, to keep in touch with your customers after closing a deal, you can use appointment pages, phone calls, and other follow-up tools. 
• Contact Roles: While pursuing a deal, you may have to talk to multiple stakeholders. Each stakeholder is a deal’s contact and may influence the deal in different ways. When you assign contact roles to a deal’s contacts, you will know how they are related to the deal. Also, you can identify the contact that can help you close the deal faster. ​​​​​​
• Quotes: You create a quote when a deal is being negotiated. 
  • Quote Approvals: Say a contact asked for a 25% discount on your product, but you are only allowed to provide a maximum of 20% off. You can set up an approval process where the quote is sent for your manager’s approval in such situations. Depending on whether the manager approves or rejects the quote, you can provide the discount.
  • Taxes: You can also configure customized taxes to apply to quotes and other documents.
• Documents: The sales process in any company involves creating and sharing multiple documents constantly. With Vtiger CRM, you can create all sales-related documents and even send them to your customers for electronic signatures (e-signing) in just a few clicks. Be it quotes and invoices or post-sale documents such as purchase orders, sales orders, receipt notes, etc., creating them is simple. Moreover, you can create folders and organize documents, so managing them becomes easy.
• Vtiger CRM for Field Sales: If you are into field sales, the geo-tracking feature in Vtiger CRM may be extremely helpful in locating a field sales representative. Also, field sales reps can check in to and check out from a client location and record the meeting notes using Vtiger CRM's mobile app. 

Sales Automation

To simplify your sales process further, Vtiger CRM provides the following automation tools. 

• Approvals: Send records to higher-level managers for approval. Configure multiple approvers and wait time. When the first-level approver does not approve within the specified wait time, Vtiger CRM automatically sends the record to the next-level approver.
• Workflows: Automate repetitive tasks with Workflows. For instance, when you sell one unit of a product, its quantity in the CRM  is updated automatically via workflows. Or when you create a task for a sales representative, you need not tell them manually about it. Simply set up a workflow, and the workflow will notify them.​​​​​​
• Sales Insights: As a sales manager, you can get insights into your team’s performance, funnel progression, revenue, and more. Vtiger CRM generates this data in the form of Sales Insights. It considers data such as a sales team’s activities (tasks, meetings, and email engagements), active and closed deals, deal amounts, and other factors to generate information.