CRM systems have taken a significant role in all companies – from start-ups to big corporations. Sales teams use it to manage their pipelines. Sourcing teams use it to manage their suppliers. Support teams use it as their knowledge base. Some companies even choose to integrate their accounting system into their CRM, in order to have a 360˚ view of their customer profiles. Here, we will break down five ways to improve CRM system efficiency.
The CRM system is one of the tools that you have to log into in the morning, which will be used and open the all day: it is a vital piece of your company. The challenge is that if you are not careful, it can end up as a huge simple repository – especially if you don’t take the time to improve it and you do not advocate user adoption.
We would like to share 5 tips that help us make our CRM system efficient on a daily basis.
Keep your data up to date
All businesses evolve very quickly. Some new businesses are created, some disappear. If you are in the B2B industry, you probably know that the data needs to be updated because prospects can join and leave their companies regularly. A contact base does not have any value if your data is not accurate. For this reason, it is important to do a bit of work to make sure that your data is constantly updated. For example, if you are doing some marketing campaigns and some emails have bounced, don’t wait to clean the data and remove them straight from your CRM system. There are also tools that can integrate with your CRM system to keep your data accurate. For example, tools to facilitate the credit checking of your customers, tools that help you to update your customer segmentation (size, industry etc).
Make sure you involve your team in this exercise by calling customers and prospects that have not been in touch with you for a while. Take all the opportunities to update their details.
Fight for data quality
Data quality is not an easy piece of cake. Many people are interacting with your CRM system and data quality is not necessarily their priority. Stand up for this fight and lock the system as much as you can in order to force the people to input the right information that you need, which will help you to understand your customers: who they are, what they want, and the issues that they face. Designate gate keepers that will track bad data quality. Run reports and dashboards to highlight them.
If some of the data has a very low data quality rate, delete them. You will realise that keeping unnecessary records in your CRM will slow you down, more than anything, because good data will be hidden behind bad data.
Sometimes you or your team WILL have to spend time cleaning data. Instead of spending days on it, schedule small data cleansing on a regular basis.
Make it simple but efficient
CRM tools are very configurable. It is very easy to add fields in to your system, or even workflows and processes. One of the most difficult targets to keep in mind is to keep the CRM system simple when business processes are getting complex. If not, with time you will end up with a lot of fields and processes that are barely used.
Even if it is not easy, try to keep your CRM system simple and intuitive for your teams. If needed, make some advanced customisations to adapt the screens per team. Involve the marketing or the UX and UI Designer to help you in making your internal users’ experience (UX) efficient and your user interface (UI) clear and simple to understand.
Integrate some tools that will increase your CRM system efficiency on a daily basis. A click-to-call tool will help you make calls easily and quickly and improve your activities. A knowledge base tool will help your support team have access to solutions with just few clicks. Have a look at the all of the tools that you can find on your CRM marketplace.
Keep training your teams
We have learned that it is necessary to train our teams on a regular basis and can make a real difference. The business and processes are changing quickly, and you need to keep your team updated all of the time. It is not easy to do but hopefully it is manageable with tools like the Salesforce CRM. You can also use features like Sales Coach.
Synchronise all of your communications
Last but not least, don’t forget to synchronise all of your communications with the customers and prospects in your CRM. Most of the CRM systems on the market provide tools to synchronise your emails with your CRM system. This will help you to easily read the interactions of your teams with specific customers, but also provides a lot of information to other teams.
Did you know that you can also synchronise your calls with your CRM systems? If you think about it, integrating your calls is even more important because you can always check on emails stored within your email inbox, but, unless you have the tool for it, you cannot come back to a non-recorded call. I’m sure you have already been in a situation where you discussed an arrangement with a customer and you had to take notes about it. CloudCall is a great tool that will help you record calls and play them back.
These are only a few small tips but they can really make a difference. If you have never heard about CloudCall before, feel free to contact us. We will be happy to show you how we use it and how it helps us to improve our teams’ CRM system efficiency.
