User Review
( votes)Customers are invaluable to any company. Therefore, every business should work hard to gain new customers and maintain a good relationship with the existing ones.
However, the work of managing customers and guiding them through the sales funnel is overwhelming. CRM can streamline the processes by gathering, organizing, and coordinating customer information. The software can work for any business, whether you serve a large customer base like Expocart or you are a small start-up company.
While CRM could be a powerful tool in your arsenal, many businesses are not utilizing it fully. A Customer Relationship Management system has numerous benefits, like improving retention and optimizing your marketing efforts. How do you improve its implementation to ensure success?
Involve your team in CRM selection
The people who will be implementing the CRM tool are your sales teams. Therefore, you need to involve them when choosing the CRM software. Specific CRMs have sophisticated features, which only hinder their use. When selecting the software, ensure it matches your organizational requirements. How do you identify your needs? Your sales team can help you pinpoint the challenges in the sales cycle and how CRM can address the problems.
When recognizing the issues, the marketing team has to identify the touchpoints with customers, how they manage the communication, and the time needed to deal with customers. With knowledge of the underlying issues, you can choose a CRM tool that will streamline the processes and ensure efficiency in customer management. If you take the ideas of your sales team into consideration, they will embrace the software.
Show the value of utilizing the software
Your sales team may have negative opinions about using CRM. For most sales professionals, they find the tool unnecessary due to the time required to update the data. Therefore, you need to highlight its value in the marketing functions. Salespeople spend most of their time researching customer data and following up on prospective buyers. With the marketing industry becoming more data-driven, sales teams are likely to get on board on the use of CRM for data management.
You need to sell the tools as software that makes their work simple by reducing tasks and optimizing marketing efforts. CRM ensures sales professionals have the necessary information to influence sales at their fingertips.
Train your team
For employees to cherish the CRM tool, they need to understand the ins and outs of the software. While it may be simple and straightforward to use, you still have to educate the workforce on how to utilize the CRM tool. The training should cover guidelines on how to operate the software, for instance, entering the company’s data in the database. Employees are diverse, and while some will find it easy figuring out how any software works, others will make mistakes leading to inefficiency.
For example, if an employee fails to register a sale in the system, it can be challenging to get accurate performance data at the end of the month. Training should cover how to navigate the workflows and the best practices for optimum performance. If the employees take a short course on the goals and implementation process, it increases adoption success and achievement of goals.
Define your CRM strategy
If you treat CRM as a plug and play tool, you are setting yourself up for failure. Therefore, before implementation, you need an excellent strategy to ensure you maximize the use of the software. How do you come up with a strategy? Once you have identified goals like customer retention or finding high-quality leads, you can come up with a strategy.
The plan should cover workflows at each stage of implementation and analyzing performance. You can compare goals with results regularly and modify your approach. Irrespective of the plan of action you decide to take, the CRM should complement the company’s vision.
Lead by example
Research indicates that CRM implementation fails due to the lack of support from the top management. We all know that the company executives motivate and drive opinions in organizations. Therefore, if the senior managers are not part of the implementation process, the employees are less likely to embrace CRM.
That is why you should get the leaders on board from the beginning to create a positive ripple effect. Managers should attend meetings, take part in training, and stay abreast of the CRM integration process.
Conclusion
CRM implementation is an on-going process, and from time to time, you need to tweak the strategy. However, you should always keep the employees happy with the system by incorporating their feedback in the implementation process.
