How to Use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) ?

CRM stands for “Customer Relationship Management.” A company’s CRM stores all of its interactions with potential and existing customers. That means everything from someone’s first visit to your website to the exact time they opened your sales proposal and how long they looked at it.

The Benefits of Using a CRM

1) Better Customer Experience

It’s much easier to provide a positive buying experience when you know a lot about your prospect. Seeing at a single glance every blog post, email, and ebook they’ve opened and/or read, as well as key details like their company’s size, location, and vertical, gives you a major leg up.

2) Higher Productivity

With a CRM, you can automate tasks like call and activity logging, reporting, deal creation, and more. The less time reps are spending on administrative work, the greater number of hours they have to get in front of prospects. Your revenue will increase proportionally.

3) Increased Collaboration

A sales manager can instantly see how and when her salespeople are reaching out to and following up with buyers. An account executive (AE) can quickly fill himself in on an opportunity his sales development rep (SDR) has prospected and qualified for him. Salespeople on the same team can learn more about each other’s best practices and pinch-hit for each other whenever someone goes on vacation or gets sick. Essentially, a CRM boosts rep collaboration and efficiency.

4) Greater insights

A CRM will give you both a high-level and on-the-ground picture of rep performance, including team-wide and individual conversion rates by deal stage, average deal size, deal velocity.

Key Terms

Contact: A contact is an individual person. Most CRMs will record their first and last name and email address. You can also keep track of details like their job title, company name, annual company revenue.

Lead: A lead has indicated an interest in your product. They might be a Marketing-Qualified Lead (MQL), meaning they’ve somehow interacted with your marketing content (for instance, downloaded an ebook), or a Sales-Qualified Lead, meaning your reps have identified them as a good fit.

Deal: Also known as an opportunity, a deal is a potential sale.

Source: Your leads come from a variety of different sources. That might include trade shows, referrals, forms on your website, webinar attendees, etc. Keeping track of conversions by source and deals won by source lets you hone in on your most effective prospecting channels.

Deal Stage: Each step in your sales process should be represented by a deal stage.

Pipeline: Deal stages are organized into pipelines. Every salesperson should have their own pipeline in the CRM so they can track which opportunities are currently in progress. As a deal gets closer to the close, it should move from the left to the right. 

How to Use a CRM 

Step 1: Add Your Salespeople

The sooner you can get all the reps on your team using your CRM, the more comprehensive and accurate your data will be. That’s why the very first step in a CRM implementation should be adding users. But make sure you’ve explained the value of a CRM specifically, how it will help your salespeople bring in more business and gotten their buy in.

Step 2: Customize Your Settings

Your CRM should reflect your sales process. That means it accurately maps to the stages a customer goes through from “lead,” to “opportunity,” to “customer.”

That requires knowing those stages in the first place. If you have no idea what your sales process looks like, take several weeks to observe and measure the way prospects buy your product or service. 

Let’s say your sales process is divided into “Connect,” “Qualify,” “Demo,” and “Close.” Create deal stages in your CRM pipeline for each one. Now, you’ve standardized the sales process for your reps.

Next, create custom properties for store your data. Your CRM will have default “properties” or fill-in-the-blank details about your prospect. For example, phone number, email address, create date, city, and so on.

Most businesses have unique properties they want to track. To give you an idea, maybe you want to add a field for “Billing ID,” “Time Zone,” “Product Purchased,” “Foreign Currency,” or “Global Office Address.” Create those custom properties now before you import any existing data to your CRM. 

Step 3: Import Your Contact, Companies, and Deals

Chances are, you’re currently using a different CRM or spreadsheets to keep track of your prospects and opportunities. Almost every CRM will let you bring in this information by uploading a CSV file. Each column in your spreadsheet should match a contact property in the CRM, so your data will flow seamlessly between your old and new systems.

Step 4: Integrate Your Other Tools

Marketing, sales, and customer success information should be centralized in your CRM. This gives you a 360-view of your prospects and customers and cuts down on manual data entry.

Leads who filled out a form, started a conversation with a rep via chat, or performed key actions on your site will be added to your CRM. If they’re highly qualified, they can be routed to a salesperson. If the lead needs more time, the marketing team can nurture them with educational content. The entire process is seamless and far more efficient. 

I suggest picking tools that already integrate with your CRM of choice so that form submissions are automatically transferred to your CRM.

Step 5: Set Up Your Dashboard

CRM dashboard is like a control panel that you can customize to fit your specific needs. For instance, choose which statistics appear on your dashboard based on your sales objectives and process. For instance, if your team is supposed to sell more of X product this month, you might want to see a breakdown of units of X product sold versus Y product. Or if you set activity metrics for your reps, you may want to have a section for the day’s “completed activities.”

Step 6: Enable Reports

CRM creates and sends daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual various reports to management and sales team to make informed business decisions and strategic planning. For instance, every rep receive a performance ranking each morning via email showing how each member of the team is doing that month. This daily digest encourages friendly competition and gives salespeople an incentive to keep working even after they’ve hit quota.

Edited by: 浪子

Bibliography

Aja Frost. (2017). How to Use a CRM: The Ultimate Guide. Retrieved from
https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/how-to-use-crm