Are You Growing With Your Customer’s Needs? It May Be Time to Up Your Game.
The good news is your company is growing! You are getting lots of qualified leads that are turning into projects. Your team is juggling those proposals and running the projects. Are you still tracking all of this information in spreadsheets? To really increase productivity and make sense of your workflow, you’ll need to arm your company with the ability to develop a lasting and responsive relationship with your customer.
I recognize that CRMs can have a bad wrap of being complex. In the beginning you’re trying to develop a workflow that fits your business, and it requires you to really think through that process. Like anything new, there is a learning curve, but just like when you developed your business plan—You did that, didn’t you?—the end result helps to create a solid future. A good CRM will provide structure for that process.
To help you begin, follow these tips when you evaluate and implement your CRM:
- Start with simple workflows. Simple workflows are easier for your staff and partners to adopt. You can always grow and expand as you become more comfortable with the software and define your process more clearly. The result will be a more collaborative relationship between your staff, partners, and customers!
- Ensure your CRM integrates with email, files, and notes. When salespeople are in their email panel, make sure that it’s easy to connect emails to the CRM. A good CRM is like a virtual file cabinet where all the information about a client is in one location.
- Convert leads to opportunities and opportunities to projects. You want your CRM to convert from a lead to an opportunity to a project. It’s important for all relevant information to transfer to the next phase of the customer relationship. That relationship should always grow, as should their loyalty!
- Train your entire team. You have spent time to create a workflow for your team. Make sure that you spread the word! Hold webinars and post reminders around the office. Get them on board and host a kickoff party so everyone is aware that this is a priority.
- Track and act on your progress. The purpose of moving to a CRM is to give you more visibility to your clients. Post your results and give transparency on your progress.
A sales workflow will look similar to this process. Define which tasks are associated with each step in the workflow so you can evaluate which of them will be done in the CRM.
Insightly is a user-friendly, cost-effective CRM that will help you to increase your sales productivity. This goes hand in hand with your planning to increase sales effectiveness and forecasting, provide visibility into the sales process and reporting, and most importantly to help retain customers! Insightly can help:
- Create a workflow with an easy pipeline set up. This will help you track your progress for each opportunity.
- Integrate with other applications. By saving emails from either Google Apps for Work Gmail or Outlook 2013/Office 365, authorized users can see all email messages associated with a contact. Also, there’s an easy integration with Evernote and document storage (Google Drive, One Drive, Drop Box and Box.com). And there’s the ability to link contacts and tasks to personal contacts and calendar items.
- Convert customer opportunities to projects. Easily tie all the information together for organization.
- Provide the reporting you need. For better executive decision making.
Building a strong sales process will ensure that your sales reps are spending their time selling and not stuck updating spreadsheets or duplicating communication. This should help them meet their sales targets and improve revenue for the organization. Upper management will have visibility to the opportunity pipeline and be able to better predict cash flows, but Insightly also provides crucial insight into your whole organizational structure. Your future depends on your ability to grow with your customers’ needs and to provide the services that will keep them your best referral partner!
Question: Do you need help defining your processes?
“Cloud strategist Jamie Lin works with companies to evaluate an overall IT strategy to improve productivity and profits. www.gizmoglobal.com
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© 2015 Gizmoglobal.com
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About the author: Jamie Lin loves to share her expertise in providing creative cloud solutions with business owners and organizations that would love to be more collaborative, flexible and productive! If you would like to engage Jamie as the speaker at your next meeting, workshop or event, contact her at jlin@gizmoglobal.com
