Converting CRM critics to champions

The biggest misconception when it comes to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms, is that they are simply a data capturing tool, and let’s be honest… just something to tick off the ever-growing list of admin tasks. In reality, when utilised correctly, a CRM is a crucial tool for businesses to understand their business, maximise team efficiency, and even boost motivation within your team. 

So let’s take a step back: what is a CRM? In simplest terms, it is a software system that allows businesses to track all communications and nurture relationships with their leads and clients. Salesforce, HubSpot, and Microsoft Dynamics are just a few examples of CRMs used by our clients. Team Vollardian will tell you that it is just so much more than software. Let me tell you why: 

• Let's talk about the “R” in “CRM”:

  • First and foremost, a CRM is a support system. When conversations and contacts are lost in inboxes, spreadsheets, or handwritten notes, customer communication is patchy and inconsistent. With all this information to hand, and centrally stored, your team can actually spend MORE time focusing on customer relationships. In our experience, when a CRM is used properly, it can enable one person to manage up to 250 clients. 

• The more data you track, the better the decisions you will make:

  • It may sound obvious, but tracking all activity, across the whole sales cycle provides insight into outreach effectiveness, value proposition communication and activity level needed to close deals. If your sales process isn’t effective, you will have the data to prove it and guidance on the changes required. 

• Motivation:

  • Anyone who has ever worked in sales has experienced that moment of looking at your targets and not knowing how to hit them. Tracking customer communication and hit rates can be invaluable in helping understand your sales cycle. For example, in our experience, it takes an average of 8 cold call attempts to reach a prospect. Providing guidance on what activities are needed to close a deal is essential to help your team understand how these targets can be achieved and, dare I say it… even get them excited about them?

• Better forecasting & target setting:

• Yes, a CRM allows you to monitor the level of activity in your sales teams, but this doesn’t mean you are micromanaging. Understanding the type and frequency of activity needed to drive sales leads gives you the ability to set realistic sales targets and more accurate forecasting.

Don’t just take our word for it, take it from the pros: Vollardian worked with Australia's leading shipping tech company to develop an outbound sales process. By introducing real-time performance tracking to drive team efforts and coaching Sales leaders to prepare long-term strategies to hit quarterly quotas by introducing the concept of target debt and accounting for healthy absenteeism in targets. 

Here at Vollardian, we aren't afraid of getting our hands dirty. By getting stuck into the back end of your CRM, cleansing data & enhancing reporting, we can help you make better decisions backed by data you trust. We are even happy to clean 40k rows of data if that's what it takes to make a CRM effective because if we don't do it, no one will.