Designing a CRM can seem like an overwhelming task. A customer relationship tool touches all aspects of the business. Anytime a customer is interacting with sales, support, engineering, or development your CRM tool should be assisting by providing meeting notes, relevant documents, and helpful email templates. So, where to start?
Upper Management
Define exactly where the company is today in terms of products, services, margins, tools, outside resources and inside talent. It is also critical to know how your company compares to the competition. Upper Management should also provide realistic and concrete goals and sales targets. These two factors will form the foundation of your sales strategy.
Sales Strategy
Customer relationship management software is key to crafting a sales strategy. Once upper management has defined revenue goals the sales leadership should craft a series of key performance indicators or KPI’s. Each KPI must be something that can be measured, such as “Cold Calls” or “Proposals Sent.”
An organization’s CRM must be designed so that it can measure each KPI and provide reports. CRM reporting ability empowers leaders to notice trends and lead from the front.
CRM Data Migration
Prior to importing data into the CRM, we find that most clients are sitting on gold that they didn’t have the knowledge or tools to mine. All of the history with respect to sales and customer relationships is buried in thousands of emails and calendar appointments.
Data Migration organizes your customer engagement history by importing it into the CRM. Categorizing, tagging, grouping and identifying network connections is the first step to effective contact management.
PRIORITIZATION
When we work with clients to categorize and segment their databases in order to mine the gold, they are quick to show us the analysis of everything those clients have purchased in the PAST. While that information is important, it only tells part of the story. In today’s competitive environment, you need to partner with your clients and find out where else they are doing business that could and should be done with you.
Viewing it from that perspective, the questions is how much business could they potentially do with us? If you are only getting 10% of their business, how can you go after the other 90% that is going to your competition? This is especially true in the B2B sales environment where a large firm may be consuming the same parts from numerous suppliers.
Defining what you EXPECT so the CRM can be built to enable Management to INSPECT
Create actionable and measurable goals in terms of practices, products, services, business or brand lines, new accounts, deeper penetration, lower service requests, higher repeat business etc. It isn’t enough for Upper Management to create the Vision and Mission Statement. The key to success is how that message is:
*Delivered to all levels of in a manner that allows every employee to understand the logic of how and why it will benefit everyone to execute on it;
*How those goals will be supported;
*How those goals will be measured;
*How those goals will be driven;
*How the meeting of those goals will be enforced!
Clarify the actual steps to be taken and the people, (by role), who will execute on those in order to achieve the goals. The CRM enables Management to monitor those steps and the results so that you can make adjustments and provide recognition or coaching. It also enables your employees to more efficiently organize and monitor the results of their own day to day efforts and achievements.
USER ADOPTION makes or breaks your CRM implementation
We work to garner User Adoption and the achievement of your goals by designing and customizing a CRM that intuitively matches the flow of your business processes and drives your specific activities. In addition, we train according to the specific User’s role. We deliver the system in a manner that demonstrates how they as individuals can benefit and grow their productivity and revenues by using the CRM. As our CRM solution is EMBEDDED with Outlook, the majority of their daily “Blocking & Tackling” activities are automatically captures.
All of those activities and relevant data points can then be rolled up in order to allow management complete transparency without asking for activity reports from your employees. A properly designed CRM can put the data at your fingertips. Management can then inspect what they expect and make adjustments in order to drive success.
It is easy to demand more sales. It is Management’s responsibility to provide clear goals, strategies, tools and guidance in order to achieve real ROI for the company, the shareholders and employees. Provide a few times when you can be available for a conversation. I’ll confirm one with an invite. Let us further discuss what we are seeing in terms of best practices in your vertical and what a properly implemented CRM can do to raise the bottom line for your company. Also, how we can facilitate your CRM seamlessly within your Microsoft Outlook!