10 secrets for successfully (re)setting up your CRM
10 secrets for building a sales machine
We’ll be presenting these ten secrets in detail in a forthcoming webinar:
1. Use the CRM system
While you, as a small business owner or IT manager, may be convinced to use a specific CRM tool, make sure you communicate its benefits to all your potential users. After all, the whole point of a CRM is to make life easier for the sales team. You won’t see the real benefits of deploying a CRM system if your entire sales team isn’t using it.
2. Customize the system to your needs
A customized CRM makes a huge difference to your business. That’s what makes us go from a CRM to your CRM.
By configuring the system to suit your business, you can immediately familiarize users with CRM. And when they’re more familiar with it, they’re more likely to adopt it.
For example, if you’re in the real estate business, the names of the modules and fields “Apartments”, “Owners”, “Buyers”, etc. help users to become familiar with the CRM system.
3. Don’t deploy features you don’t need
Always be clear about what you expect from your CRM system. There are many features that could prove very useful for your business. At the same time, remember that there may also be features that the CRM provider entices you to buy through its marketing.
For example, if your website isn’t a major source of leads, but you spend time and money on visitor insight and live chat tools, you run the risk of unnecessarily complicating your CRM by adding features that aren’t essential.
Ask yourself, “Do these features really add value to my business?”
And deploy only the features your business really needs. And make sure you don’t spend extra money on anything that isn’t absolutely necessary.
4. Automate the routine. Use your time for what’s important
The best thing about a CRM solution is that it reduces most of the routine tasks you perform manually, leaving you enough time to concentrate on the most important areas.
For example, there are certain things that salespeople do right after their customers’ visits, such as :
- Send a follow-up email
- Update a transaction status field
- Create a reminder task with a call in a few days if the customer does not respond
On average, a sales rep spends around 15 minutes after each visit carrying out these repetitive tasks, which add up to around an hour or two a day. What if all this could be done with just one click? Automation makes it possible.
Automation not only saves you time, but also ensures that your customers are loyal to your brand, rather than those of your competitors.
5. Ensure data security
Your company handles sensitive and confidential customer information, ranging from something as simple as an e-mail address to price quotations and service level agreements. That’s why it’s so important to guarantee data security in your CRM.
6. Connect the puzzle pieces
Companies no longer rely on a single application.
You’ve got your website, your email service provider, your social media sites, your pbx systems and many more applications involved.
With every application you use, you leave behind information about your customers and your business transactions. But as long as information is dispersed in silos, you’ll never be able to get a complete picture of your own business, let alone deliver an incredible customer experience.
Like a jigsaw puzzle, it’s only when you connect all the pieces that you get the complete picture.
7. Analyze and improve
Many companies still use their CRM systems simply to store customer information. But a CRM can certainly do a lot more than that.
You’ll be amazed at how much you can learn from your own company’s data to help you analyze your current business and plan for the future.
Features such as reports, dashboards, forecasts, etc. make planning for the future easier and more efficient.
8. Review, reorganize and rediscover
Always keep an eye on market trends and make sure your CRM system supports these features.
Keep an eye out for major feature updates from your CRM supplier.
It’s not wise to stay with the same set of features all the time. You can’t meet your customers’ expectations with an obsolete CRM system. Ultimately, you’ll lose them to your competitors, who will gain access to the market more quickly.
9. Train your staff
To ensure that your teams take full ownership of your CRM, it’s very important to provide regular training for your teams, as well as initial training for all new CRM users.
ZOHO offers 2 tools to make videos available to your teams. These two tools are ZOHO People and ZOHO Learn.
10. Enhance CRM to make it more pleasant
It’s important to pay special attention to embellishing your CRM.
That’s why we recommend that you never leave fields and information that users don’t need for their day-to-day work.
To embellish your CRM, you could, for example, add photos of your contacts (which you could find on LinkedIn) as well as account logos. Scraping tools exist to collect them with a single click from LinkedIn.
If you want to go even further, awaken your designer’s soul with the
Canvas Builder for Zoho CRM
.If you set up your CRM system to work according to your own processes, whichever system you choose will help you deliver an outstanding customer and user experience, which will also help you generate exceptional revenues.
You think your work is done after deploying your CRM? This is not the case. It’s all just begun!
We’ll be presenting these ten secrets in detail in a forthcoming webinar:
Companies all over the world have recognized the importance of a CRM system. Almost every company uses some form of CRM. And we can see that many tools are not being explored to their full potential, or even used at all.
Have you just purchased a CRM system? Start with minimal use and one data entry. In the long term, however, you’ll need to make the most of all available features to suit your business needs. Especially if you expect a good return on your CRM investment. Don’t forget to take into account the changing dynamics and trends of the CRM market.
