🔥 It’s about time you reap the benefits of your investment!
Your company is equipped with a CRM.
This platform should provide you with concrete benefits:
➡️ better visibility of the state of your business
➡️ effective support for your sales team, enabling them to reinforce their strategy and its implementation.
CRM is, without a doubt, an indispensable tool for professionalizing your sales practices and enabling your sales reps to perform more profitable sales.
Although CRM is expected to be the best ally of the sales rep and his or her manager, the platform must also provide essential support to general management, the finance department, the pre-sales team, marketing and the operations team in charge of project implementation.
In this respect, CRM is more than just a sales platform.
Despite these many benefits for businesses, a detailed analysis can show that, despite successful technical implementation and substantial financial investment, the CRM practice, in your company, could urgently need improvement.
👉 That’s your case if you recognize yourself in this non-exhaustive list:
📌 Insufficient data quality and poor CRM practice: pipelines are updated the day before sales meetings, opportunities not showing, lost business that appears as still active, incorrect or incomplete customer information.
📌 Parallel universes: a “financial” budget (by the finance team) and a “sales” budget by the sales team that show major differences.
📌 Under-utilization of the CRM and therefore of its functionalities: no, or very few, dashboards; information from the CRM is presented and analyzed in the form of Excel spreadsheets.
📌 A CRM seen as an administrative constraint by sales reps, If not as “micro-management”.
📌 A pipeline that doesn’t reflect the current state of business, requiring a contact with the sales manager who, in turn, has to call his/her sales reps to get the latest status of their individual pipeline and projections. The sales manager becomes, de facto, the bottleneck and obligatory passage for what is a basic functionality of any CRM.
📌 sales meetings based exclusively on numbers reporting instead of strategic discussions.
To sum up:
🚫 an underused CRM,
🚫 reserved for the sales team,
🚫 and which adds little value to the strategy and day-to-day lives of sales reps and associated teams.
All the more reason for companies in this situation to ask themselves the following 10 questions:
1️⃣ What were your expectations when you invested in a CRM?
Before investing, had you described the tangible benefits that CRM would bring to your company in terms of sales practices, business visibility and predictability, cross-team collaboration, strategy and sales implementation?
2️⃣ Is your CRM an enterprise platform…. whose use is optional?
For what reason(s) is it tolerated that the use of a business platform designed to improve visibility and predictability is optional?
In view of the substantial sums invested in CRM and its proven benefits for your business, shouldn’t its use by sales staff be a prerequisite?
3️⃣ Poor data quality that prevents you from capitalizing on your business?
As your company operates in markets that are as unpredictable as they are competitive, how can you carry out high-quality analyses and develop the intelligence needed to draw up a strategy and manage it on the basis of incomplete or even erroneous information?
What impact does this have on the company’s other tools? And systems (ERP,…)
4️⃣ If the CRM is under-utilized, what alternative do you use? Is this alternative satisfactory?
How is the analysis of figures, trends, success rates, etc. carried out outside a dedicated platform such as the CRM?
Excel, intuition and experience may have many advantages, but CRM offers an unparalleled wealth of analysis… without the need for manual processing.
5️⃣ Sales reps who don’t want to be “micro managed and monitored”?
Of all the functions present in a company, sales is one of those whose performance is synonymous with KPI-based management.
This is self-evident, since it is contractually binding, and remuneration is linked to measured performance.
Sales reps are asked to “deliver”. It’s the very essence of their job.
What to think about a sales rep’s reluctance to make his/her activity (results and projections) visible to management and the company?
6️⃣ A mature and professional sales practice despite low CRM adoption? Isn’t this an oxymoron?
A team that is focused on the right market segments, that systematically qualifies all new business, that collaborates internally, that ensures a structured exchange of best practices, that makes visible the opportunities, risks, strengths and weaknesses of its approach, market developments and that is able to implement actions rapidly and objectively…. without benefiting from the wealth of information and insights that a CRM brings?
It’s not impossible, but it’s still better with the CRM already in place in your company.
CRM really reveals the sales practices of your teams…. and their managers.
However, the tool is not the practice. A CRM will not compensate for poor sales practices.
An excellent sales practice coupled with MS Excel will always be better than a quality CRM without a mature sales practice.
7️⃣ CRM data confined to the sales department? While impacting other teams and systems?
Budgeting done by Finance without direct input from sales?
Senior management not having access to the CRM?
Teams involved in the business, such as the pre-sales team and operations, who don’t have access to information from CRM?
What impact does this have on their ability to help qualify complex deals and better manage the activity rate of their teams?
8️⃣ Management meetings based on Excel extracts, when every CRM has a wealth of functionalities?
No CRM dashboards?
Little or no qualitative analysis?
In extreme cases: opportunities discussed at these meetings… which are not present in the CRM?
9️⃣ A CRM focused on business reporting? A sales manager “crunching numbers”?
CRM is a fantastic tool for producing KPIs, monitoring the number of appointments and customer calls, visualizing conversion rates and other indicators.
This is obviously necessary, but far from sufficient.
What about the dashboards that help you refine your strategy, define your recruitment needs, strengthen collaboration and avoid silos?
The sales manager’s role is not to consolidate figures communicated to him by the sales team. This task should be left to the tool. The manager, as a good leader, must create and steer an efficient sales machine based on the information at his disposal.
The CRM is a platform that enables the sales manager to focus his/her attention with his/her team, during individual and collective meetings, on the intelligence of the platform, which goes far beyond the simple production of figures and various compilations.
And finally, an essential question
🔟 Is an under-utilized CRM an investment or rather a cost?
Implementing CRM entails direct costs, such as software subscription, training, implementation, etc., which are often underestimated and unforeseen.
In cases where CRM is under-utilized, additional hidden costs need to be factored in, such as the difficulty of drawing up in-depth analyses enabling rapid adjustment of sales strategy, and a lack of focus impacting conversion rates, among others.
Without an obvious ROI, this investment is a cost.
❎ The good news is that it’s possible to change course and generate a much better ROI from your CRM investment.
Here, I’ve put together a series of quick wins that you can implement right away and that have shown immediate results:
▶️ (re)Train teams without delay:
How many sales reps don’t use CRM … because they don’t know how to use it; recurring update sessions, easy access to tutorials and user support is a Must.
▶️ Decree that “what’s not in CRM doesn’t exist”:
Using CRM, for sales reps is not an option and data quality is a minimum requirement. Make CRM the single platform for sales inputs.
▶️ Make input quality a non-negotiable point.
As the quality of your analyses is directly dependent on the quality of your inputs, apply the principle of “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well”.
▶️ Make CRM the sole source of information on sales activity and results:
Meetings (individual, collective, sales and management) must be based on information from CRM, so avoid paper printouts and MS Excel-type pipeline extracts, and access CRM and its dashboards live during meetings.
▶️ Limit “parallel universes” and avoid silos by giving general management, finance, operations, the pre-sales team and marketing access to CRM.
And above all
💥 First and foremost, remind and sell your teams on the benefits of a CRM.
CRM must be seen as the best ally of the salesperson and his or her manager. The sales manager is fundamental to ensuring the adoption of CRM by his or her teams.
💥 Beyond quick wins, it is essential to consider this improvement in practice as a fundamental process, and to commit to a structural effort.
In my experience, the greatest accelerator of CRM adoption by the sales team is … the adoption of CRM by senior Management.
👉 Are you interested in a CRM assessment and the path to getting the best ROI from your investment? Let’s discuss https://calendly.com/better-is-more
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