On the Twelfth Day of Christmas, my CRM gave to me:
12 Leads to follow
The starting point for all sales is the initial lead or prospect. By keeping these separate from your actual customers you don’t clutter up your customer information and can see quickly and easily who are potential customers and who you have already got on the books.
This is particularly important when creating campaigns, scheduling calls etc. as you can then see exactly who you are targeting. It also means that you can restrict third parties down to only seeing leads you are chasing and not your actual customers if you are outsourcing your sales and marketing.
Leads become customers...
customers buy products/services...
your business supplies those products/services...
And what happens then? Do you simply say “Thank you for your custom, here’s your product” and walk away? Or do you follow up at regular intervals; send mails out to them letting them know of other products/services which they may be interested in, based on the previous purchases? Do you maintain an up to date list of your customers’ details, addresses, who is still working there and who has moved on? Do you have a system in place that will allow you to do all this and more? Do you have a way of sharing that information to all relevant staff, regardless of whether they are in the same office, the same country?
On the Eleventh Day of Christmas, my CRM gave to me:
11 Custom Modules
So your company structure has changed. An additional function has been created within your organisation.
How does your current CRM solution cope? Does it simply stay static, with no possibility of integrating the new function as a separate module? Do you have to try to shoehorn it in to an existing module by adding a few extra fields in a vain attempt to fill the requirements? Does your CRM allow you to create enough fields, or does it limit you as to the number of fields you can create, meaning you either have to merge two of your new fields into one confusing mess, or simply leave some data out?
Your CRM solution should be able to allow the creation of new modules to let it grow with your company. Your business should dictate how your CRM works. Your CRM shouldn’t dictate how your business works. Your organisation functions and procedures don’t stay the same forever, so why should your CRM?
On the Tenth Day of Christmas, my CRM gave to me:
10 Pipeline Tables
As a key component of your company’s sales function, your CRM should be able to show you the pipelines of individual or group sales peoples. It should give both graphical and textual information allowing both the salespeople and management to see, at a glance, exactly how they are doing.
This not only gives visibility as to performance of an individual, but can also be used to keep track of which opportunities are the ones that should be concentrated on more – after all, it’s pointless chasing an opportunity that only has a 10% chance of being won, when there are 90% probable opportunities sitting there, and your pipeline should allow you to see this easily.
On the Ninth Day of Christmas, my CRM gave to me:
9 Mails to Archive
It’s all very well to have all your customer information in one place, but what about those emails in your external mail client (whether it be Outlook or Thunderbird)? How are you going to get THAT information into your CRM?
You could simply copy and paste the contents of each email into a note on your CRM system, but then what about the attachment that came with the email? You could save that to your network and put the location in the note.
Or (and here’s a novel idea), you could simply get your email client to automatically archive directly into your CRM system.
One of the main reasons CRM systems get bad reputations is not because they are inherently bad, but because the data is not kept up to date. By allowing your email client to automatically archive every incoming and outgoing email where the sender or recipient address is found in your CRM you ensure that the paper trail of communications with you leads and customers is not lost.
On the Eighth Day of Christmas, my CRM gave to me:
8 Ways to lock down.
Some of the information in your CRM may not be for general viewing. You may not want the production team seeing what your sales team’s targets are, or how their Profit Related Pay is performing. You may not want the sales team seeing the IT department’s budget for the next year.
Your CRM should be capable of restricting access to certain data for a number of reasons. You should be able to restrict based on job role or team memberships, your web-based CRM should be able to support secure HTTPS connections to encrypt that information in transit, you should give the user control of some of their settings, customers should be able to access specific data through a web portal, you should be able to hide modules that are not needed to save unnecessarily cluttering your view and your users should be able to customise their own dashboards to let them quickly see the information THEY need on their own login.
OK, so the title says “8 Ways to Lock Down” and you can only see seven in the list above. A titling error, or have you been restricted to only seeing seven?
On the Seventh Day of Christmas, my CRM gave to me:
7 Custom Workflows
Once you have received a lead, how many items do you have to create to schedule the calls to the person for the future, to remind you to send out those emails encouraging the potential customer to look further into your products?
When you mark an opportunity as won, how many steps do you have to take to let the accounts department know to send out an invoice, to let the production team know they have a new item to make, or to let dispatch know to send out the order?
With automated Workflows, you should be able to do all of those just by one step.
Not only does this save you time, it also increases your value within the organisation as you are no longer costing the company as much to perform those tasks. Your productivity increases, the company’s productivity increases and that can only be a good thing as this means the company becomes more valuable.
On the Sixth Day of Christmas, my CRM gave to me:
6 Meetings scheduled
How many people in your organisation know you have that vital meeting tomorrow morning? When you come into the office tomorrow, how many people will ask you why you are there and not on your way to meet your client? Can you remember what meetings you’ve got coming up and who reminds you?
Meeting Schedules and calendar events are not something that you should be keeping to yourself. It makes no sense whatsoever to keep a closed book of appointments if you are expecting other people in your organisation to be able to assist in your absence by arranging appointments, callbacks or training sessions. Information shared is powerful information. While you may not want to disclose EVERYTHING you are doing at all times, it makes sense to allow at least key members of your team know when you will be available. Even if it’s only to portray a more professional image to callers – there’s nothing worse, as someone trying to contact you, than ringing each day to be told “No, he’s not here today, but he might be in tomorrow. I don’t know because I don’t have access to his calendar”. Far from protecting your business, not sharing information your calendar can potentially injure it and with notifications reminding you of upcoming appointments, your CRM system should be at the centre of your customer calendaring.
On the Fifth Day of Christmas, my CRM gave to me:
5 Mail Campaigns
A vital part of any sales and marketing function is the ability to send out bulk information to as many people as possible with as little effort as possible. It therefore makes perfect sense to have a mass campaign element to your CRM system.
By keeping the information in the same system, you can have a full view as to which leads or contacts have received which campaigns, and with detailed reporting on those campaigns you can see who read that discount email you just sent out, which link they clicked on, how many times they read it and thus target your sales more precisely as to who is already interested in what you have to offer.
On the Fourth Day of Christmas, my CRM gave to me:
4 Calls to make
Calls to both potential and existing customers should be something at the forefront of your sales and customer service functions. There is the old saying that “If we don’t look after the customer, someone else will” and this is just as true when applied to calls. If you don’t call them, someone else will. Why risk missing those important call dates and times and potentially losing the business to a competitor?
With call scheduling an integral part of the CRM system, you will always know who you are supposed to be calling, when and what was said to date in the historical calls.
With a call schedule log on the front page of your CRM, there will never again be a reason to say “I’m sorry I didn’t call, I completely forgot”!
On the Third Day of Christmas, my CRM gave to me:
3 Fresh Quotes
Customer proposals or quotes are not something which should be cluttering up your accounting package. Until you get sign-off it is NOT an accountancy matter, but a Sales function instead.
What easier way to create proposals than from within the same system as the information about who it is to be sent to, what you have been discussing and what stage you’re at with the sales process?
Your CRM should offer customisable layouts to allow your proposals to carry your corporate branding, you should be able to cherry pick from a list of predefined products or services which pre-filled descriptions and prices or have the option to enter your own, if you desire.
By performing the quoting task within your CRM system, you have full visibility of all sales related matters at your fingertips without having to double enter contact details or communication information.
On the Second Day of Christmas, my CRM gave to me:
2 Graph Reports
Getting the information contained in your CRM into an easy to view report has always been a headache for many, with information being exported into a new spreadsheet, formulas having to be worked out, colour schemes being set, reset and then removed after it confuses the whole view. Your CRM should be able to provide reports on anything stored within it, in whatever format you need whether it be a bar chart, pie chart, text table or simply a file to export for a third party application in .CSV format.
On the First Day of Christmas, my CRM gave to me:
A login wherever I may be
Accessing your customer data is the lifeblood of your company's success. If you are restricted to only being able to get to that data when you are in your office, due to it being in locally stored files which cannot be accessed from anywhere else, then you are restricting your capabilities from day one and that means that your sales team, for a start, cannot perform fully out on the road. It's a bit like going on a road trip and having road map pinned to your living room wall. You can plan your route at home, see where everything you want to get to is, but as soon as you're out of the door, it's all down to what notes you may (or may not) have made before hand, as well as the quality of those notes. Get those notes wrong or lose them, and you're on your own - LITERALLY!
With our hosted SugarCRM solutions, you need never worry about not having access to your data, whether it be contact details, company documents, historical information about the meeting you're heading to (and where and when that meeting is!) or to send a reminder to a colleague to send off that parcel you left on your desk. As long as you have an internet connection you can access your data, whether from your home PC, your work desktop, your laptop, your iPhone, Android or Blackberry with the SugarCRM Mobile Apps, or via your mobile device with its default web browser.
Keeping a good relationship with your customers is essential. Your company just handles the money, your customers pay your wage!
For more information, contact our Sales team now, on +44 (0)1473 618980 or email Sales@SugarUK.co.uk and make your New Year's resolution to get your CRM in order.
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