How Do You Know If Your CRM Is Adding Coordination Value?
Have you ever thought about the value that a coordinated business flow has to your team and your customers? In my mind, this is such a big deal. Why is this a big deal? Here are some of my thoughts related to a coordinated business flow for your team and your customers.
- Like a perfectly executed double-play in baseball, it begins by knowing what to do before the play occurs. In business, that translates into what to do for a new-found buyer of your products and/or services. It stands to reason that if your buyers all have similar characteristics and needs then your process for converting the prospect into a buyer should be the same. Like turning a double-play with two outs and a man on 3rd with a left-handed batter. Thus, a coordinated business flow begins with consistently handling the steps from prospect to customer by your team by role.
- The business flow is as good as your data inputs related to the people in and around your business. I can’t tell you how many instances where we have been asked to come help an organization with their CRM that is full of empty fields, irrelevant information, and poor quality data in the contact records. I’ll ask why they have all of those empty fields and the response is usually something like “our IT guy said these are good fields to have”. I’ve been in technology and innovation for over 30 years and I promise you that is not the person to be laying out what your operations, sales, and marketing people need to see as they do their jobs. We work tirelessly for our customers to focus on easy to input, highly valuable, less is more type data for all records. We focus on not just this but how can we protect that field from input errors as well as how can we populate a field automatically based on the input of another field. This drives consistency and a coordinated value for our customers.
- The outcome of items 1 and 2 are that the reporting and forecasting results are accurate and reliable for decision making. How many times have you experienced a revenue forecast change at the last minute before a board meeting? Tough to explain a material change to the board when prior forecasts were different. Even worse, the cash projections that follow the revenue forecast are off so now the bank and/or CFO are up in arms.
CRM is so valuable to an organization when executed properly. I’ve seen enough instances where the execution as been poor and not only is there no value from a coordinated team but there are so many other problems that get created that really adversely position an organization.
Are you finding that this is happening with your team? Call me. We can solve this for you and it won’t break the bank.