Why Your Company Needs a CRM

Your company’s lead sales person just quit on the spot. The business needs to reach out to all her accounts and contacts to maintain continuity. Are you panicking on where this wealth of phone numbers and emails might reside? Is your next step to rifle through a stack of business cards, or search through her Outlook contacts? If that’s the case, and this entire scenario gives you a bit of heartburn, it’s time to invest in a customer relationship management (CRM) system.

A CRM is many things, but at its root, is a simple premise building off the scenario above. No single person should ever “own” contact information. It should never be held on one sales person’s phone or desktop. Continuity of business – the if-you-were-hit-by-a-truck-today scenario – requires that contact information reside in a central location.

Additional benefits a CRM will bring to a business include:

Marketing Automation link – A CRM linked to your company’s marketing automation system will archive what campaigns, emails, and invites business contacts were included on. In addition, most will note when they visited your website, and what forms were completed. Basically, the CRM will give you a snapshot of marketing touches with each individual.

Running history of accounts – Many CRMs will archive emails, proposals, and calls to contacts, as well as offer a notes section. They also enable you categorize the account, for instance as a prospect, former customer, etc., as well as note what services (purchases) they bought. The benefit here is if a new sales manager takes over a particular account they can quickly get updated on previous, current, and future sales activity.

Lead management – What happens after a lead is handed off to a sales manager? Many CRMs can codify the process and be built to provide follow-up reminders for specific actions in the sales cycle. The end result is better accounting for leads once they enter your system.

Reporting – A CRM will allow you to run any number of reports from simple customer lists, prospects lists, sales opportunities, etc.

A well-maintained CRM will not only help sales and marketing work in sync, but also will ensure continuity of business. While staff is responsible for accounts and their respective contacts, by housing contact information in one spot, companies set the baseline expectation that the information is solely owned by the company.

Six Steps to Keeping your CRM Data Clean

The customer relationship management (CRM) system is an invaluable tool in organizing customer contacts, tracking sales, and managing leads. This tool, however, is only as good as the quality of the information in it. Your CRM can quickly become a mess of outdated phone numbers and invalid emails if not managed properly.

This can seem daunting – especially considering many salespeople have hundreds, or even thousands of individual contacts to manage. But if you take small steps every day to keep the information clean, you will have a much more valuable tool.

1. Perform an audit. Twice a year, randomly draw 10 contacts for each salesperson, and reach out to each one to verify the accuracy of the information in your CRM. This is a great way to gauge how clean the data is in the system as a whole.
2. Check for missing information. Every quarter, salespeople should run a report of all their contacts in the system to check for ones that have important information missing (i.e. title, email, phone number, and address). Then, they can create a hit list of people to reach out to and fill in the blanks.
3. Track updates. Have your CRM administrator add a field to track the last time a contact’s information was verified. If the salesperson pulls up a contact and sees it’s been two years since they last confirmed the contact numbers, etc., it’s probably time for an update.
4. Send a mass email. Most CRM’s give users the ability to send out mass emails. Create a list of people whose information is likely out-of-date, and send an email asking them to verify key contact details. Then, you can update the database as their responses come in.
5. Customer visits. When sales staff makes their regular customer visits, they should print out a list of every contact they have for that customer. When they arrive for their meeting, the salesperson should hand that list to the receptionist to verify and edit.
6. Email signatures. This one is simple. Every time you receive an email from a contact, verify their email signature against the information in your database. 

A CRM system is a great tool, but you need to regularly put in work managing the quality of the data to make sure it continues to provide value to your company.