NPS, CPL, B2B… in our world of sales and marketing jargon the acronyms are endless! One you might want to pay special attention to (if you’ve not already) is CRM— Customer Relationship Management. CRM acts as a one stop shop functioning as a data hub, sales tracker, and reporting tool all in one and is an essential must have to effectively stay connected and grow the funnel. If your organization is lacking a robust CRM in place, you may be ready to ditch the spreadsheets for the right platform. How can you ensure you are fully maximizing your investment and getting the most out of your CRM?
Use the Tool Effectively, Don’t let it Use You
According to a Gartner study, a well-implemented CRM can increase revenue by a whopping 41% per sales person (source: SuperOffice). But as highly customizable and robust as it can get, CRM should absolutely not take a “one size fits all” approach to an organization! Regardless of the specific product you’ve decided on, it’s important to scale your UX accordingly and know which features are conducive and make sense for your business. After all, the tool is only as efficient as its users—and all the features in the world can become meaningless if no one can figure out how to use them properly.
Integrate:
Make sure you are integrating with any other in-house and cloud-based applications and platforms your company is using (i.e. Outlook, QuickBooks, marketing automation software). Sales reps and colleagues tend to track activities in different ways, which makes it difficult to piece data together to paint a clear picture for customer sales leads. CRM’s make data entry uniform—especially when paired with existing tools—making it a breeze to get an in-depth look at target accounts as well as the overall health of your organization. (source: HubSpot)
Go Mobile:
According to Sage Software Solutions, mobile technologies will explode by more than 500% in 2016 alone. A mobile-enabled CRM not only allows for increased productivity, but can also significantly shorten the sales cycle by seeing customer metrics and behaviour develop in real time. Our cellphones and tablets have become beloved gadget fixtures in our lives (I’m certainly no exception here!), and now more than ever people expect demand access to data and applications from anywhere, any time. In a nutshell: a mobile CRM is no longer an option—it’s a necessity.
Keep Data Fresh (and so clean, clean ):
In order to engage potential customers across multiple devices in multiple channels, you need clean data. Accounts, key people, and their contact information should be regularly updated to create a holistic, bird’s eye view of your customers and their activity. Bad data in always means bad data out—so make sure you are committed to your data maintenance plan to a T.
Check out this super cool, Mad Men-themed infographic courtesy of Velocify that highlights the evolution of the selling strategy—now go get em, Don Drapers’.
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