Welcome to a multi-part series on how to succeed with CRM.
By now, most of you reading this have or are using a CRM right now. It could be Salesforce.com, Microsoft CRM, Sugar, ACT, etc.
My guess is that most of you are NOT getting the value you thought you would from your CRM.
Maybe you are asking yourself: “What’s the point of shoving all of this information into a massive filing cabinet?”
Keep reading to find out and learn more about CRM from a Sales Manager’s point of view.
CRM From the Perspective of a Sales Manager
For a Sales Manager, so many areas of their responsibility can and should come of CRM.
Let’s have a look:
- Metrics: Using the “opportunities” section of most CRM means you can track something as simple as lead-to-quote and quote-to-sale ratios. Now, you can calculate how many leads you need, and by when, to achieve your sales goals. Also, think about all the coaching you can now do with your reps – Pretty cool, eh?
- Forecasting: If opportunities are used, you can now maintain an accurate pipeline of what sales are to come, when, and at what probability of closure. No more guessing or building spreadsheets, your pipeline will be updating live.
- Sales Process: Set a sales process for the team to use. You now build it into your CRM (by customizing the Leads, Account, and/or Opportunities tabs) and then use reports to confirm it’s happening and where to improve.
- Coaching: Having shared access to everyone’s leads, opportunities, history, next actions, or notes, means a Sales Manager can see the gaps to coach. Most people don’t know their own gaps, so a good Sales Manager digs into the data to uncover the story.
- Commissions: If you want CRM to be accurate, have commissions come from Closed/Won opportunities in your CRM. That’ll motivate’em!
- Reporting: If you are taking hours to build reports in excel, you are wasting your time. CRM, if used, will spit out real-time reports for you and other management.
- Marketing: As a Sales Manager, you want marketing to do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. But sales must play a simple, but important, role for this to happen. Make sure to link a lead or opportunity to the marketing campaign/lead source. Marketing now has the power to make the right decisions – which, in turn, helps you generate more leads and close more sales.
- Resource Transitions: People in sales come and go, that we all know. CRM means you get to re-assign Leads and Accounts in 30 seconds. But more importantly, the new sales rep in turn gets to view and read all the history, notes, emails, and opportunities with that customer. Just imagine that!
If you are a Sales Manager, you are setting the tone of the value CRM can bring your company. Above are 7 different areas of your job that CRM impacts directly. Let’s get going, managers!
