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( votes)To be successful with your CRM system, you need to capture sales activities consistently. Ideally, you should be able to rely on each member of your sales and marketing teams to track their activities and all interactions with your customers.
But if the process is not easy, they won’t do it. It’s always easier not to do it.
From the salesperson’s perspective, they want to focus on selling. No one is interested in repetitive, tedious admin work that gets in the way of that. On the other hand, sales management wants visibility into the call volume and types of outbound touches being made across the sales department. These are key performance metrics that provide great insight into prospect and client engagement. But those metrics can only be realized if the information is in a consistent format aligned with the company’s methodology and sales qualification parameters. Only then will your CRM solution reveal its full value by providing actionable insights.
How can Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales help your organization track outbound sales activity?
Let’s follow one of your inside sales reps through a day of prospecting.
They start their day reviewing their call list. They are focused on nurturing existing customers and finding new ones. Their goal is to qualify or disqualify potential business opportunities. So, they pick up the phone and start calling. Then they record the results of the call and move to the next prospect call. Scheduling reminders and recording customer data in daily planners and spreadsheets is time-consuming. The right CRM system automates these processes and provides a scalable system everyone can work from.
Here’s where Dynamics 365 Sales comes in.
Suppose one salesperson only tracks his activities with comments such as ‘good conversation’, while another salesperson tracks outbound touches in an entirely different way. In that case, management will never have visibility into the total outbound effort across the organization. Consistency is vital if your organization wants to measure what matters and not miss any trends that could result in new business opportunities.
At Crowe, we work with sales organizations to implement tools and methodologies that make the prospecting process more efficient and your sales team more successful. Our goal is to make CRM entry and tracking so streamlined and easy that everyone will use it consistently, and all will benefit from the cumulative insight captured in the system.
With prospecting, it’s essential to track all outbound contacts methodically. After all, outbound touches take time, and you want to be able to quantify your investment.
- If your sales rep leaves a voice mail, do they track it and schedule a follow-up activity?
- If they talk to someone who refers them to someone else, is that information recorded?
- Is the new contact’s information saved?
- Does the sales rep schedule a follow-up activity with the person they were referred to?
- Is there a standard schedule for follow-up activities so they can cycle through a list based on when they made their last outbound attempt?
- How do you measure marketing’s influence on the sales pipeline?
- Do you disqualify prospects or reposition your approach based on inactivity?
These are all important questions for any business engaged in outbound sales activities.
At Crowe, we provide tools and methodologies that make the sales prospecting process more efficient and the data more useful. We streamline your sales team’s administrative efforts by reducing the number of clicks for tracking and recording outbound touches. Crowe and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales will give your organization the needed visibility into customer and prospecting activities.
Would you like to know more about tracking outbound sales activities in Dynamics 365 Sales? Contact our experts at Crowe.
By Ryan Plourde, Crowe LLP, crowecrm.com
The post Best Practices for Tracking Outbound Sales Activity in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.
