So you’ve got your CRM system, but things don’t seem to be working as well as you hoped. Here are three things you can do to supercharge your CRM and get things back on track.
Focus on the people
There are plenty of CRM products out there – many are easy to get started, with watered down features – but also have a lack of involvement with the end-users in the organisation. If you’ve opened an account with a click to start CRM company then you’ve almost certainly spent no time considering the product, its impact on your users, or have buy-in from the entire company.
CRM becomes the heart of a company once implemented. Its functions touch every part of the business so once your CRM is purchased, you must get buy-in from the users. Focus on your people. Sell the idea of the CRM into your business from the top-down but also ensure there is an understanding of what benefits your team will get from a CRM.
Just some of the benefits of choosing the right CRM include:
- Reducing the number of keystrokes in administrative tasks such as the three clicks system in BuddyCRM. Studies show many people disengage if tasks take more than three clicks. Focus on the people in the business to ensure your CRM is assisting them to complete their tasks quickly and easily.
- Better record-keeping
- Increased access to information
Training should be sufficient and high quality to ensure that the team know why things were chosen, why we do it this way, and to enforce the positives, the benefits to each individual that arise from adopting the CRM.
People concentrate on themselves so look for a solution that allows them to access information simply, with few barriers to entry. Work with a company that will assist you in finding out what your individuals need from a system and have that as a forefront of your CRM project plan.
Single Customer View
Your CRM carries the contact information of all the companies your business deals with. It should hold not just the discussions and meetings that occur but also the other interactions between company and customer. Perhaps information that your third party software provides. eg. financial information, accounts, and marketing emails. This pertinent information helps the individual do their job to the best of their ability for the company.
Creating a single customer view from all the pieces of information your company collects allows your salesperson to understand more about their customer. From the screenshot below, you can see sales information has been brought in from the accounting package and graphed to give a much clearer view of the trading situation with this company.
So it’s not just daily communication (notes, emails, calls, meetings) that a CRM can store but other useful information like opened marketing emails, quotes, orders, and sales. Once you have a complete single customer view your team will feel more empowered to deliver and have more angles to work at.
Often when selling our CRM, we hear salespeople say, ‘a CRM will get in the way of my job.’ But this isn’t true, a CRM is a facilitator of their job – it can do so much more to assist in their role than just collect notes.
Quality Reporting
Remember, what goes in comes out. Quality data in to the system will deliver quality information out. Decent reports are a minimum requirement for CRM to be useful to your company.
But this all comes back to the people who use it. When training your team, you’ll need to emphasise the culture and ethos of your business – that what each individual does has an effect on the entire business.
Putting the correct information into account records, ie. entering notes in correct fields, names in correct boxes, phone numbers, etc. means that reports will carry weight and be trustworthy when delivered.
What happens when that information is not entered correctly? Trust in the database falls apart and trust in the reports it produces is diminished.
So you’ll end up back at square one and your investment in the CRM will have been wasted .
Demonstrating the usefulness of reports to the team will ensure buy-in for their accurate entry of information. What use is the CRM to the business? Sales enablement.
There you are. Three things you can do to supercharge your CRM today. Focus on your people, create single customer views, and work on your reporting.
This supercharge article is a summary of the presentation delivered by Adam Hannath, Sales Director, BuddyCRM for the recent Sales Masterclass Series. Watch the full presentation below.