How to Avoid CRM Failure with a Sales-Focused Approach
Today, the biggest fear of an organization that has just bought a new CRM system is that no one will use the solution. Unfortunately, this happens more often than many business leaders realize. The reasons for CRM failure may vary from business to business and come down to the fact that the CRM solution failed to meet the company’s expectations.
What are the expectations of CRM software? It depends on the person you are asking and the root of the problem that often leads to CRM failure. Several stakeholders in an organization have different expectations for CRM, and it is nearly impossible for every expectation to be fulfilled. This means that no matter how well received the customer relationship management solution maybe by some employees, it’s perceived an inability to do all work for everyone leads to user abandonment.
Hence, what is the ultimate solution? CRM succeeds when everybody in a company shares the same expectations for what the software will do. Such expectations need to be informed by what the CRM solution is and is not designed to do.
What CRM Systems Can Do
Customer relationship management solutions are no longer only for large-scale industries with huge databases of the client and are advantageous to small and medium-sized companies. It is designed to streamline your processes and can be one of the most powerful management tools in your arsenal. Here we present how a CRM solution benefits and expands your business.
- Project Management
- Reporting and Visibility
- Sales Forecasting
- Delivery Management
CRM for Sales
CRM applications make sales teams efficient, faster, and more organized. When salespeople sell more, revenue goes up. It is the return on investment metric that each organization must use to measure CRM software’s success or failure. Sales representatives must be ensured that the CRM solution is there to help them sell more, manage territory efficiently, and access additional resources during the sales cycle. At the time when a company’s sales department purchases and starts using CRM software, all other pieces start falling into place.
Forecasting, reporting, managing opportunities, these things rely heavily on a company’s sales department to input information and notes for each prospect and customer.
CRM for Marketing
Any successful sales department needs a close relationship with its marketing team. Salespeople are typically the last point of contact prospective purchasers have with an organization before buying which means it is critical for the marketing team to pass along useful data and set client expectations.
At times, there is a schism between the marketing and sales departments. Marketers blame salespeople for not following up properly on the leads they have created, and the sales team fires back claiming that the leads they have been given are not qualified to start with.
If sales teams do not believe the leads that the marketing has put into the CRM system are valuable, it makes them far less likely to utilize the CRM solution in the first place. In order to avoid a standoff, both departments need to have a shared understanding of what constitutes an ideal customer profile and a qualified lead.
Working together on these problems will aid marketing teams to filter out prospects that sales do not want, and salespeople can then believe that the leads that make it into the system will be qualified and worth following up.
The Bottom Line
Taking a sales-focused approach to CRM enables businesses to meet behind an easy to support objective and provides stakeholders a simple way to measure return on an investment after implementing the software.
Salespeople must be a business’s most passionate CRM advocate. When this takes place, they feed the software that it requires to make it more useful for everyone else. This is the reason, it is so crucial to involve an organization’s sales department in CRM evaluation and selection procedure.
