CRM – the Heart and Backbone of Your Organization
Or at least, it should be.
For many sales teams, CRM can feel like a burden, often leading to underutilization or poor usage. It's tempting to attribute this to salespeople's lack of proficiency or laziness. However, regardless of the reasons, the outcome is a direct and negative impact on performance, not just within sales but across the entire organization. Conversely, high-performing organizations typically exhibit robust and effective CRM usage.
Now, let's delve into why CRM serves as both the heart and backbone of your organization.
The Backbone
Let's tackle the backbone of CRM. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, a vital tool for managing and tracking engagements with customers, prospects, and leads. While these tools come with a cost, investing in them is non-negotiable if you're serious about sales and growth. The return on investment is practically guaranteed.
As operations scale up, the significance of CRM amplifies. Think of it as a Swiss army knife, versatile and indispensable. The data you input feeds into various departments, making CRM the backbone of your organization. Consider this:
Sales: It's the optimal way to track your pipeline and forecast accurately.
Finance: Predictive insights inform financial performance, crucial for listed or public companies.
Production: It helps set the tone for production capacity, especially for tangible products.
Marketing: Influences marketing strategy and campaign effectiveness, tracking campaign results.
Invoicing: Integrating with invoicing tools ensures accurate billing aligned with sales.
Compensation: Proper CRM usage directly impacts compensation accuracy.
CRM isn't just for sales; it's a shared tool across departments, fostering knowledge sharing and collaboration. If customer data is scattered across different systems, it's a sign of siloed operations.
The Heart
Now, let's explore the heart of CRM. A simple yet profound mantra to remember its importance in sales: "If it's not in the CRM, it doesn't exist." Logging an opportunity serves multiple purposes:
To follow up on your business, actions, and progress: It's a roadmap of your sales journey.
To delimit and protect your territory: CRM delineates your sphere of influence and safeguards it.
To showcase your activities: It's a platform to demonstrate your efforts and achievements.
To request resources, such as technical support: CRM facilitates collaboration and assistance.
To ensure timely payment: It streamlines invoicing and payment processes.
Your CRM is the lifeblood of your organization. Each new piece of information added represents a heartbeat, essential for the vitality of your sales pipeline. Whether your sales cycle resembles a sprinter's rapid pace or a deep diver's meticulous preparation, tracking your CRM's pulse is imperative for staying on course, regardless of your industry.
Why Misuse (if not No Use)…
Let's dissect the issue of CRM misuse, if not neglect. Throughout my career, working with various tools like Salesforce and Siebel, I've noticed a glaring indicator of an organization's sales drive: how they utilize their CRM. The complexity of CRM usage often mirrors the level of sales orientation within an organization. Put simply, the more convoluted the process for salespeople to create and progress opportunities, the less focused the organization is on sales. This complexity not only hampers productivity but also compromises the accuracy of any analysis derived from CRM input.
The knee-jerk reaction to this misuse often attributes it to salespeople's laziness. While this may hold some truth, delving deeper reveals that people aren't inherently lazy when they understand the rationale behind their tasks and see direct benefits. Moreover, sales professionals are typically drawn to the field for client interactions, not endless laptop sessions. Hence, if CRM processes hinder remote management, they're destined to fail.
… and How to Change This?
So, how do we rectify this situation? The solution is straightforward yet sometimes challenging to acknowledge: create a CRM journey centered around salespeople. CRM platforms typically align with sales pipeline stages, but the tendency to add extraneous steps catering to other departments creeps in. Take, for example, the initial prospecting phase, where salespeople are inundated with irrelevant fields like product names, usage types, and direct or indirect (via partner) sale. While pertinent eventually, they're superfluous at this stage.
A sales-centric approach means streamlining workflows to their essentials, especially as opportunities progress. And as the opportunity progresses, all the questions will be answered. In due time. Therefore, by eliminating mandatory internal data fields and focusing on customer-centric questions like recent contacts (aka account mapping), decision criteria, and champions, CRM usage becomes more intuitive and effective. Your CRM is being used for what it is designed: to track your sales pipeline.
The more complex your solution is, the more stakeholders will be involved directly influencing the sales process's intricacy. Closing a substantial deal necessitates comprehensive engagement with all key decision-makers, not just one contact. Understanding customer pain points, evaluation criteria, and value propositions beyond price ensures a tailored proposal, not just a bid in a commoditized market. That information should be logged in your CRM.
These insights aren't just relevant for closing deals; they're pivotal for organizational learning and growth. By equipping sales teams with the right questions and empowering them to delve deeper into customer needs, CRM becomes a powerful ally in driving sales and fostering organizational excellence. All those inputs are beneficial for the rest of the organization: this is how actually you improve your playbook.
In conclusion, let's reiterate the paramount importance of CRM for any organization, particularly for sales teams. The potential for automation and time-saving is immense, making CRM an indispensable asset in today's business landscape.
As a sales professional, I urge you to explore the depths of your CRM tool to uncover the myriad benefits it offers. And as a manager, it's crucial to communicate these benefits clearly to your team from the outset, starting with their onboarding process. By the way, as a manager, do you truly understand how your CRM system is introduced to new team members? Because it should not be about a couple of introductory sessions; it's about conveying the tangible advantages and showing them how to leverage the tool effectively. In addition, leading by example is critical. If you, as a manager, are unfamiliar with the intricacies of the CRM tool, your guidance may lack credibility. Familiarize yourself with the tool, its processes, and requirements to effectively guide your team. Moreover, don't hesitate to share the reports and dashboards you extract from the CRM with your team. Seeing the insights firsthand can illuminate the "why" behind CRM usage and drive adoption rates upward, benefiting the entire organization.
In essence, embracing CRM isn't just about adopting a new tool—it's about unlocking its full potential to drive sales success and organizational growth.