Is your CRM system helping your account managers to reach their goals?

If you are embarking on a new CRM implementation or have had a system for years, some simple strategies can increase your success. This will make your account managers and sales reps more productive to do their jobs better with less stress so that they can sell more.

In this four-part series, I want to share a few of the fundamental principles I have learned after working on literally hundreds of CRM implementations.

While these tips seem straight-forward, it is surprising how often they are overlooked. This can make all the difference between account managers that love the CRM system and ones that view it as a burden.

Remember “Less is more.”

When a company first installs a CRM system, or over time, they often realize they have hundreds of fields to capture data. This creates hoops for account managers to jump through, which causes frustration and slows your team down from efficiently serving your customers.

Minimize data capture = reduce frustration + build a full picture

We always encourage customers to minimize data capture. Add the fields that are essential to understand your customers and your prospects. Focus on those fields and get rid of the rest. You want to reduce the barriers for your users and still build the complete picture that allows them to serve your customers.

Track the right activities – stay on top of key touchpoints and follow ups

Of course, it is important to keep on top of key touchpoints and follow-ups. However, many customers who come to us who don’t have CRM want to track everything their people are doing. I understand that motivation, but most of the time, you just want to track the important things.

You don’t want to go into CRM and see a list of activities that is a mile long but an inch deep. For example, do you need to track every time someone leaves a message? Instead, track the important conversations that moved the relationship forward or follow-ups that you are required to make sure the customer stays happy.

Track the key emails – be aware of the double-edged sword

A common request we get is, “can CRM track all my emails?” The answer is yes, it can. But again, it’s a double-edged sword. Do you really want to track all the emails sent back and forth just to book a meeting? Key emails, like important requests from a customer or contract updates, are the ones to track in CRM. Or just track the final email that books the key meeting to discuss the proposal, without all the boring ones that generally fill our Outlook inboxes.

Remember, you do not want to drown out the signal because you put too much noise in there.

Action Steps

Eliminating the noise is a simple strategy that makes it easier for your account managers and sales reps to use CRM to stay on top of customer relationships and sell more.

Schedule time to review screens and processes with your team and look for ways to reduce fields, minimize data capture and eliminate unnecessary tracking in your CRM.

An outside, objective perspective can often help you see past the clutter and pinpoint the changes that will give you the greatest impact. If you are using or evaluating Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM, Azamba Consulting can help.

To talk about how the Azamba Consulting Group can assist you with your CRM implementation or development project, contact us online or call 888.724.3999.

Peter Wolf