If there’s one thing most sales managers have in common, it’s the challenge of time management. With dozens of tasks and only so many hours in the day, there’s often little time left over to focus on what’s most important – nurturing leads and building client relationships.

The beauty of a CRM system is that it’s designed to help make the job of managing a sales team easy and efficient. Rather than having to dig through files and manually update spreadsheets, all of the sales data you need can be found in one centralized place and accessed at the click of a button.

But the right CRM system can do so much more than just automate manual tasks. The five tips below will help you unlock additional time-saving benefits and enable you to focus more on producing results than on managing the daily grind.

Track Productivity

Wouldn’t it be great if you could see a snapshot of your team’s productivity and gauge areas for opportunity in an instant instead of having to waste time tracking down data manually? That’s what’s great about a CRM. You can easily track the activities of your sales force at any given moment in time. Find out the exact number of emails, calls and meetings your team is scheduling and use these metrics for coaching and process improvement.

Measure Revenue

Keeping your finger on the pulse of your team’s performance is a critical component of your duties as sales manager. How much progress is each rep making? You can use your CRM system to run reports on everything from number of deals closed to open opportunities to revenue leaders and more. You can then use this information to engage with your reps and help them improve their performance.

Create Custom Reports

You’re not the only one who needs to see the progress your sales reps are making. Your team can also draw significant motivation from seeing the monetary value of their hard work. A CRM can save you time by gathering the necessary data and compiling it into user-friendly, easy-to-understand reports that can drive continued success.

Manage Leads

Routing leads to your sales reps ensures that all prospects receive the nurturing they need to improve the chances of conversion. It also ensures that work is distributed appropriately amongst all team members. Having a CRM can provide insight on each rep’s workload and make it super easy to automatically allocate leads accordingly. You can also use filters to divvy up prospects by certain criteria so that they get assigned to the rep that is most skilled at handling that type of lead. For instance, you can filter by industry, niche, company size and more.

Assign Tasks

Successful sales managers are excellent at delegating work to the right individuals. Trying to handle too much on your own leaves you with less time to manage your reps and work with clients. A CRM allows you to create a list of tasks and assign them to yourself and your teammates all in one place. By optimizing how work is assigned and performed, more time can be spent on things like nurturing leads and closing deals.

A CRM system can do so much more than just help you organize your contacts. With the tips above in place, you can spend less time on manual tasks and more time developing your team and growing your business.