Suffering from summer slump with your CRM? Now’s the time to take a fresh look at all the features your content management system offers, clean up your records, and make sure you’re back on track to getting the most out of your software.
Give Yourself a Refresher
It’s entirely possible that you’ve forgotten some of the cool features your CRM has to offer. When you first learned how to use it, you could only retain so much information. You likely picked a handful of the most important features to help you achieve your goals, then left the rest to rot.
So what are you leaving on the table? Maybe you’re using it to help with sales, but you forgot about all the cool project management features. Or you didn’t realize that you could get cool reports on leads. Just think what adding these components to your CRM management could do for your business!
Take some time to reacquaint yourself with the full capacity of your CRM platform. Take notes on the aspects you’d like to incorporate (or add back to) your processes, and if you need to learn how to use these features, spend some time boning up.
Update Your Records
Sure, it’s no fun to go through all your client records and make sure they’re up to date, but doing so can greatly improve sales and marketing results. If you’re sending emails to people who don’t work at a company anymore, those emails don’t have the conversion potential the way an updated and active email address does.
Updating your records is a great excuse to check in to see how your contacts are doing. You can use the updating as the reason you’re emailing them, but you can also see how things are going and gauge whether there is any potential business that you can earn from your contacts. It also serves as a reminder to your network that you’re there, ready to help when they need you.
See What’s New
Likely, your CRM added new features since you last checked (at Insightly, we’re constantly adding new features, like the Insightly Sidebar for Gmail). You may be amazed to find that features you wistfully yearned for are now available. Implement these new tools into your sales process and see how much easier it can get.
Train Newbies
If you have new employees who haven’t yet been walked through how to use your CRM platform, dedicate time to ensure that everyone is up to speed. And it’s not a bad idea to have employees who were initially trained on using it take a refresher course so that they, like you, don’t miss any opportunities your CRM software offers.
Now is a good time to get feedback from those employees on how they like the CRM. Are there aspects they don’t like, or features they would like to implement? You can take their input into consideration as you continually innovate on how you use customer relationship management software.
Look for Integrations
The CRM world is full of integrations with a lot of the tools you’re already using, like accounting, email, and marketing apps and programs. If you can save time connecting your CRM with the tools you use on a regular basis, why wouldn’t you? Plus, integrations tend to streamline your work. Rather than plugging in contact info into both your CRM and email marketing platform, you can do it once and let that connection update the other system. Less work, more results.
If Q4 is a busy one for you, the summer is the perfect time to make sure your CRM is ship-shape for your big sales season. And even if it’s not, we could all use a reminder of everything our CRM platform can do for our businesses. It doesn’t have to eat a ton of time to give your CRM a summer makeover: spending even 15 minutes a day for a week can turn you into a CRM super star!
At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.
