It’s a tale as old as time—your sales team wants access to financial information to improve their sales performance. Providing additional licenses to access these materials is no walk in the park, causing the finance team to drag their feet in fulfilling the request. Now, the sales team is looking towards you, the business owner.
What do you do?
A recent study by Robert Half found that a mere 25% of privately held companies share financial information with all of their employees. So, if you’re on the opaque side of the financial transparency spectrum, you’re not alone. Just know that this number is growing exponentially as more information surfaces about the benefits of disclosing financials. Information is power, and sales teams can certainly benefit from your disclosure, along with your profit margins.
My recommendation? Rather than granting the sales team full access, only share what is actionable and relevant to them with integrated Customer Relationship Management (CRM).
Whether you’re a small or medium sized company, integrating your CRM system with your accounting can help you increase profits and drive business results by giving employees visibility into your business performance. To save time, improve productivity, and reduce duplicate data entry, it’s time for sales and accounting to start talking, and pairing these two systems together can make it happen.
Your company is already gathering this data—why not put it to use by combining forces? Integrating CRM with your accounting helps you combine the power of your customer data with your financial data. It gives your sales team access to the financial information they need without granting them the power to change important financial information. This will help your finance team sleep soundly at night. It’s a win-win and everybody’s happy!
When you integrate these two systems, your sales team will have the ability to access sales history, open orders, ship dates, credit balances, invoices and more. This kind of visibility and understanding of each account will spark better conversations with customers. Most of today’s technologies allow users to access this financial information from any device. So, if someone from your sales team is meeting with a customer offsite and needs to check in on a financial matter, they can do so quickly right from their phone.
To learn more about the benefits of integrating CRM with your accounting solution, get in touch with the friendly experts at ACI today. We can’t wait to hear more about your business.
