Why Fine-Tuning Salesforce Can Dramatically Improve Operations and Productivity

These days, customer data is created in so many forms, on so many platforms, that making sense of it as a unified whole without software such as Salesforce CRM has become difficult. And if your business is in the process of scaling it’s nearly impossible.

During the early stages of your business, an Excel spreadsheet and a notepad were probably enough to maintain seller-to-customer relationships. As your organization has grown, so has its inherent complexity. Suddenly you need processes to scale your infrastructure, team, and technology. It can be daunting.

Fortunately, CRM can spin gold from all the chaos of customer relationships. CRM manages and integrates many of those front-office activities: sales processes, tracking customer interactions, lead acquisition and conversion, and marketing collection and management of customer information. It allows you to visualize the landscape instead of stumbling blindly through it.

When captured and interpreted, the patterns within all of this customer data inform your salesperson’s next interaction with the prospect or customer. A higher percentage of those interactions result in sales, which results in growth, which results in revenue.

Ready to dive in? Here are the top signs your business needs a CRM solution.

Time Wasted Hunting Information

When independent islands of information dot your organization, your salespeople can be stuck at sea without a paddle. If customer and order info is stored in more than one location – especially when it’s a spreadsheet on a local hard drive or Post-It notes in a cubicle, your sales team is at a serious disadvantage. Without a single view of every customer’s contact info, orders, and interactions, your salespeople will spend far more time tracking down data and far less time selling.

But we’re a startup, you might say. We don’t need a CRM system yet. CRMs are no longer just for large-scale organizations with huge databases of customers. They also help small and medium-sized organization. Why? Because you don’t have to be a Fortune 500 company to develop silos.

Perhaps you’re a small organization now, but growth happens. The fact of the matter is that it’s a whole lot easier to deploy a CRM system before you scale, rather than after.

According to a recent study, sales reps spend about one-third of their time actually selling. The rest is spent searching for or creating data content, reporting, administrative, or lead generation tasks. What would your sales numbers look like if your sales team was freed up to sell two-thirds of the time?

What’s worse than wasting time searching for data? Finding bad data. IBM recently estimated that poor quality data costs the U.S. $3 trillion a year. How much is bad data costing you? It’s impossible to know if you can’t find it or don’t know it’s bad.

Finally, CRM lets you tailor access. You decide who has permission to access what customer information. Not only will this keep your salespeople focused, it will keep them honest.

Lack of Visibility

What are your salespeople doing right now? How did they do last week? How are their leads looking for the remainder of the quarter? How many leads are slipping through the cracks? Many organizations cannot answer these questions. Not only do they lack visibility into how their customers are connecting with employees, they also lack insight into what their salespeople are doing.

This lack of visibility not only complicates your sales team’s jobs, it also prevents you from holding them accountable. That’s easier said than done. Sales directors often complain that sales managers are too soft on their teams 95 percent of the time and too hard the other 5 percent. It’s a conversation that, poorly handled, can undermine your sales culture.

A set of detailed and easily understandable sales metrics helps during a meeting to assess performance. When numbers are the focus and not behaviors, your sales managers can soberly assess expectations and outcomes. In addition, salespeople are far less likely to feel as if their character is being attacked. They understand expectations. With transparency comes accountability.

Knowing the numbers before the numbers become a problem can minimize the number of uncomfortable accountability conversations your people are having in the first place.

Reports Are Hard to Share

Have you ever had a salesperson complain they spend more time generating reports than selling? It’s an age-old quandary. Nothing handcuffs your top sales talent like bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is a profound liability in today’s hyperkinetic digital environment. It undermines fresh thinking and perpetuates past mistakes. It often gives power to the wrong people. If an organization is unwilling to adapt and learn, the entire organization can stall.

The creation of manual reports is bureaucracy at its worst. They are not only cumbersome and time-consuming to create, they offer zero value in terms of tracking. In this day and age, you need sales reports that provide granular, real-time, actionable data. Sales reports can track numbers specific to location, time, category, employee, item and even compare sales associated with new versus returning customers. Manual sales reports are not only one-dimensional, they are also untimely and of suspect value.

Leadership must be able to compare a sales team’s progress against its quota. That is metrics at their most basic. To compete in a data-driven world, you need real-time window into every reportable aspect of sales.  As commerce moves deeper into digital and across more channels, real-time data is becoming a prerequisite for sales and marketing success.

If your business is not data-driven, have you stopped to ask yourself what is driving it? Probably educated guesses, which is pretty scary if you think about.

No Mobile Solution

Your sales reps do their best work in the field. They’re crisscrossing the county or the globe meeting prospects and collecting the information that will drive your organization’s future growth. Unfortunately, much of this potentially vital data is stored on the equivalent of a cocktail napkin or stashed in poorly names files on personal computers. It’s not only impossible for you to find, it is also easily lost.

The fact of the matter is that sales teams often don’t transfer their notes and a major client can be lost before he or she is even landed. Without a mobile CRM solution that allows your people to easily and quickly upload data on the road, you are running a potentially huge risk every day.

After generating leads, your ability to move prospects along your sales funnel quickly and efficient begins with lead management. Even if that data is not lost all together, it can become useless and cold if it is allowed to languish outside the system for too long.

Also, if a member of your sales team moves on from your organization, they don’t take their leads with them.  

Missed Data Means Missed Opportunities, Lack of Focus

It’s hard to really know anyone if you only have their name, job title, and location. It’s even more difficult to sell anything to them. There’s a good reason businesses in every sector have begun collecting every scrap of data they can from customers. It’s really valuable.

Your sales team is probably not logging enough detail about customers and prospects. As a result, they are likely sending the same types of offers and messages to customers and prospects, all of which are probably in very different stages of the buying process – not to mention different industries or geographies. This unfocused, scattershot approach is guaranteed to repel more than it attracts. No one likes to be contacted by a salesperson with more questions than answers.

The more data you have, the more capable you are of targeting prospects based on their value to the business. Timing, as they say, is everything. When enough data has been collected, you will be able to ever more clearly identify the optimal time to convert prospect to customer.

Once it has converted that prospect, your salesperson now has what he or she needs to resell or upsell that customer in a timely and effective way. It’s the Holy Grail of sales. Give your customers what they want before they even know they need it.

If this valuable data is not centrally located in the cloud, of course, it is in constant danger of disappearing into a crashed laptop or out the door with a departing employee. Maybe your computer systems gets infected with a virus. Maybe someone hacks into your IT system. Maybe your building burns down in a fire.

If you’re storing customer data locally in your system and something unexpected happens, you are toast. A loss like that can set your scaling timetable back to the Stone Age.

No Strategy to Scale Fast

Scalable growth is all about pairing exponential revenue growth with incrementally increasing costs. Are your current organizational processes built to scale fast? Will you be able to maintain productivity while growing tenfold in a year?

To scale successfully, your business must become more efficient. In this day and age that means technology. You can gain huge economies of scale and more throughput, with less labor, if you invest wisely in technology.

Automation, like that in CRM, can help you run your business at lower cost and more efficiently by minimizing manual work. By automating sales processes, it not only speeds up and improves the entire sales cycle, it delivers a data mine rich with valuable customer insights. Within that data is the roadmap to successful growth.

Strong customer relationships reside at the core of every company’s success. CRM resides that the core of its ability to scale.