Increase Sales Enablement Actions Available using CRM

We are often asked for our recommendations for improving the involvement of Sales Professionals, Customer Service and Managers with a company's CRM system.  As we have mentioned before, user adoption is critical to long-term business success with CRM.

Your CRM software needs to have the capabilities to make it easier and faster for users to perform their daily tasks, all the while capturing collective intelligence.  That knowledge of the customer and their environment can then be strategically used in business development and grow a more valuable business.

Our list of improvement suggestions for capturing collective intelligence and harnessing it for smarter, faster decisions. 1. Make it easy and useful to connect with Microsoft Outlook

Email is essential and was probably one of the first digital methods used to connect with people, so your CRM system must integrate with email.  At the minimum, your CRM system will have icons or hyperlinks that when clicked, automatically integrate email to and from your Outlook/Gmail system.

In fact, while you are working in your CRM like Creatio, you will not have to pop over to the email system. Since emails are automatically synchronized you can easily see the contact's email history of communications.

Helpful when you need to remember a past conversation and don't want to waste time looking up that message in Outlook. 

Bonus:  Create an email template and use that so your business shows consistency and the email will have valuable business links to company information.

2. Enhance your Desktop integration with mobile phone/tablet devices

Since all the CRM information is in one relational database, you can use your mobile phone or tablet to view the same information as your laptop or desktop.

3. Show sales history of products and services

Your accounting and production systems have related collective intelligence about the customer, so why not share this information with your sales team and allow them to come to their own insights?  Is this customer buying different products, or more or less? Is the average price paid to change? Is there a positive or negative change year to date? 

Answers to these questions can easily be made available in your Creatio database.  We have integrated accounting information from Intuit QuickBooks and a wide range of other commercial and custom systems.

Bonus:  While bringing in accounting information, consider also importing aging, terms, credit limit, shipping instructions, etc.  This can all be helpful to making smarter decisions, faster.

4. Provide integrated quote/proposal generation and management

About every business we come across has some sort of quote, proposal, RFP, or opportunity process that is used.  The capability of having this within CRM benefits not only the users in managing their quotes and revisions but also the customer who needs to clearly understand what they are asked to buy.  Many times the built-in opportunity management of CRM fills the need and, if not, there are some good solutions available.  

Note: When was the last time a prospective customer received your electronic quote and so clearly understood it that they said approved and Thanked you?  Speed up the sales cycle with an accessible and easy-to-quote system for the sales team and a clear formatted, understandable quote for the prospect.

Bonus: Sales Creatio provides project management that can be used for the implementation project/job management of the recent sale.

5. Get personal with your contacts- build relationships

Your CRM needs to cover the basics such as gender, birth date, spouse, children names, education, and favorites: pets, movies, hobbies, sports, etc.)

Some of the best ideas we have implemented are:

• • Picture of the person
  • How they prefer to be contacted:  phone, email, face-to-face
  • Level of influence in the company
  • Level of our influence with them
  • The date they became a customer - send an anniversary card...
  • Organizations they support:  BNI, United Way, Save the Children
  • What do they value: relationship & personal actions; efficiency, cost and time savings; or comfort and avoiding pain at all costs
  • Why did they buy from our company instead of a competitor

Bonus: Creatio low-code CRM is easily configurable to add new fields, modify the data forms, apply business rules and run business processes to alert you of key changes that make for a stronger personal connection.

6. Get social with a contact

Social media is now a required component in a CRM and contact management system. Identify the person's profiles in LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Blog.

Bonus:  Figure out which social media source is where your customers hang out. Then have your CRM system show the latest activity from that social media feed.

7. Integrate online sources of knowledge about companies and contacts

Nearly every day we hear of a new business opportunity to link up your company information to other online data sources.  For example, you can link your contacts with their LinkedIn profiles and then receive data updates and alerts of their status change. 

Imagine how helpful it would be for your salespeople to be alerted that the CEO, CFO, President, etc. have changed positions or that the company has made a decision for massive expansion?

Check with us to discover other sources to build your company's collective intelligence

8. Create sales playbooks and make selling a process

Selling 2.0 methodology empowers sales and marketing to work together. Salespeople are armed with better tools and improved processes so they can connect with the best "ideal" prospects, pursue richer opportunities, collaborate more effectively with customers and co-workers, and close more sales faster.  Likewise, sales managers can run a far more productive and predictive sales organization.

• • Standardize best practices - update on a regular basis
  • Identify competitor strengths, weaknesses, and strategy selling against
  • Identify up-selling and cross-selling possibilities
  • Identify the buyers' decision process and key influential contacts
  • Identify additional customer wants and requests - may become future sales opportunity or strategic alliance.
  • Identify lead, reference, and referral sources

Now decide which of these are best for your specific business, create that sales playbook and implement these into your CRM. 

Creatio Sales Playbook

9. Incorporate customer service/support

Make sure to plan the implementation of your customer service component of your CRM system.  Within Service Creatio the support/service issue is based internally as a 'Case' management system that captures the customer’s issue, assigning it for resolution, clarifying it by service category, a priority, proceeding through resolution and keeping those involved with communicated updates.

Creatio service agent dashboard

It may also involve a customer self-service portal component allowing your customers to search your knowledge base and then create a service ticket if needed.

Now when that service issue is created and when its status is updated to closed, the related sales account manager is notified.  If you are a salesperson about ready to visit a customer, it helps to be armed with this collective intelligence!

10. Stay in touch and find out who's listening

Statistics show that over 60% of customers will leave a business because they feel left out, not communicated with on a timely basis, and not a priority for your business.  Throughout our website and blog, we mention the importance of staying in touch and being "Top of Mind" with prospects and customers.

Make sure that in your CRM system you have identified the preferred method of communication with each contact, have valid personal contact information, email addresses, identified roles in their business, Yes/No if they are on your newsletter list, and so forth.  Use the collective intelligence you have in your CRM database asset and reach out.

The marketing automation is built in Marketing Creatio which provides helpful integrated tools for communicating your value proposition consistently, capturing the feedback from customer surveys, and measuring your responses.

Each salesperson can view their contacts and quickly discover who is on their call list based on their interest in your marketing campaigns.

Bring together customer-focused methodology and productivity-enhancing technologies that transform selling from an art to a science.  Arm your salespeople with better tools and improved processes.  Make your business work smarter with CRM.

How could your business do better with a repeatable and customer-enabled process built within a quality CRM?

What steps can you add to capturing collective intelligence with CRM?

Email me or call our office:  269-445-3001