Manage Your Software Team with CRM Software
As a Sales Manager, wouldn’t you love to get to the end of a week and know that the biggest deals and opportunities and the highest priority customers received the most time and attention from your team? How about knowing that your team was functioning at maximum efficiency and their peak performance level?It is widely known how CRM software helps businesses grow and maintain relationships with prospects and customers by organizing data into one central hub. One of the happy outcomes of a well used CRM System is that it personalizes the experience for the customer and provides amazing levels of support. But how can the CRM tool help you, the Sales Manager / Sales Director / VP of Sales, manage and own the sales process and elicit top performance from your own Sales Team?
Leads / Opportunities / Activities
If you can get a handle on tracking these three areas, you will see your team soar. Some team members will be better than others at converting leads and bringing new business in the door, so you can use that information to position members within areas of responsibilities. A good CRM system will tell you how long it takes to convert leads and where they came from.
If you measure team members and their “won opportunities” side by side over a month or quarter, issues and patterns will sometimes emerge showing where deals were lost or won. This makes for an excellent team meeting review exercise or coaching session.
Activity levels can be tracked by you, including outbound calls, inbound response times, emails, physical meetings and follow-ups. Standard documentation procedures for record updates should be emphasized. Activities are the lifeline of the pipeline – focus them on the biggest deals and highest-priority customers. Advanced CRM platforms are rapidly integrating email, voip phone services and other third party services making data collection a breeze. Being a sales person myself I know the largest hurdle to accurately tracking activity data getting it entered. Minimizing the human element of data entry through business process automation is the shortest path to success in tracking this data efficiently.
Dashboards
Decide what your most critical business metrics are and set up tables so you can see them at a glance. For example, dashboards can show:
- User adoption of the CRM System by your team members
- Goals and activity metrics for a particular time period
- Support and service metrics of the customer experience
With your team’s pipeline information handy, you can make better strategic decisions, plan ahead and focus on helping everyone reach their quotas. Dashboards replace cumbersome excel spreadsheets that track individual performance and pipeline health. Forecasting is easier using the real time data from your team rather than waiting for reports that are generated on monthly or quarterly schedules. Finally, delegation is a snap, with a simple change of record ownership or tasks generated to the chosen team member.
Prioritize Coaching of Team Members
If you are watching for it, Sales Managers can see when a team member needs help with a deal, with a specific opportunity or just help in general. You can also put a spotlight on team members who consistently hit quotas so you encourage effective behavior and share best practices. This helps you track emerging trends or avoid mistakes made in the past.
CRM used to be thought of as a tool used by enterprises, costly, challenging to implement and designed for large teams. More recently, the focus for (SaaS) CRM providers has been on medium to small businesses, affordable, (even free in some cases), user friendly and accessible.
5 top CRM Software plans are worth mentioning here, especially when it comes to small business: Salesforce.com, Insightly, Nutshell, Pipedrive and, because it is the most popular of the “free at the entry level” stage, I’ll mention Zoho.com.
Salesforce.com is the rock star of CRM systems. Number one in popularity, it has been around for 16 years and learned to adapt itself to big and small company needs in one comprehensive, cloud based software solution. It is partly responsible for the stigma that CRM is expensive and designed for large enterprises. In response, Salesforce.com developed its small business edition with all of the features and tools you could want in a robust CRM system. You get what you pay for is the best way to summarize their price tag.
Insightly has a more affordable price tag and simplistic approach with just the simple basics of a CRM system, and the ability to grow as needed. It has the “free” option to get started and is dedicated to integration with Google apps, Office 365 and Outlook.
NutShell has an affordable price tag yet some high-end integrations, and the ability to grow as needed. It offers integration points with Quickbooks, MailChimp, Google Apps, Trello, Twitter and QuoteRoller just to name a few. One feature I found very innovation was the audio dictation of notes after a meeting while in the car, you can use their app to dictate a recap while moving to your next engagement.
PipeDrive is built around a drag and drop pipeline view, where your deals are displayed by your different sales stages. This clearly displays how your pipeline and team is doing and helps you focus on the right deals at the right time. Like Nutshell it has great third party integrations however is very dependent on Google apps, so if your Microsoft shop it might tend to be more challenging to implement. Our firm like most emerging technology consultants has been heavily based on Google apps from day one, so PipeDrive has been great for us. The reporting is not as heavy duty as Salesforce or Nutshell, but it’s user interface is dead simple and keeps our sales staff moving forward efficiently.
Zoho CRM is a true full featured “free” CRM solution (up to 10 users), ideal for testing out the unique features that could help your business. Of course you can purchase the upgrade plans if you find it useful, but this free version even includes Zoho CRM’s mobile app for accessing your 360 deg. view of your business, 24/7, right in the palm of your hand.
Probably the most important tip for success is as old as the hills. Good practices are best passed from the top down. If you are a model user of your CRM system, your team will follow and reap the benefits along the way.
Comments
Tags: CRM, Sales Management
Trackback from your site.