How to Use a CRM

As your business grows, keeping track of your potential leads, new opportunities and customers with spreadsheets and random documents or notes in different places starts to become a bit of a nightmare scenario.

Not only is this incredibly time consuming to manage, but things also start slipping through the cracks at an very alarming rate. This only serves to de-moralise and exhaust your team and very much disappoint your customers.

Don’t let that happen to your business!

That’s why you need a CRM.

The advantages of using a CRM.

1. Better Customer Experience

It’s much easier to provide a positive buying experience when you know a lot about prospective customers. Seeing at a single glance every activity, message sent, as well as key details like their company’s size, location, and key financials, gives you a major leg up.

You can personalize your messaging and provide more value from the start.

2. Higher Productivity

With a CRM, you can automate tasks like call and activity logging, reporting, opportunity & quote creation, and so much more.

The less time your sales team are spending on administrative stuff, the more time they have to get in front of customers new and old. Your revenue will increase proportionally.

3. Increased Collaboration

Sales managers can instantly see how and when their salespeople are reaching out to and following up with leads & opportunities.

Salespeople on the same team can learn more about each other’s best practices and pinch-hit for each other whenever someone goes on vacation or gets sick.

Essentially, a CRM boosts collaboration and efficiency.

4. Greater Insights

Stop wondering how your salespeople are doing. A CRM will give you both a high-level and on-the-ground picture of your sales teams performance, including team-wide and individual conversion rates by opportunity stage, average deal values, deal turn-around times and much more.

Imagine what you could do with this data-backed understanding of what’s working and what could be improved.

Your CRM Strategy

A CRM strategy keeps your organization focused on its goals. There are a lot of valuable tools and features that make up a CRM. But just because they’re available doesn’t mean they should be put to use (just yet)

Many businesses stop using a CRM because they get overwhelmed. It’s understandable but avoidable — if you create a CRM strategy upfront.

First, chat with your team to understand your goals. Yes, you want to better manage your customer relationships, but how? Why? What specific customer behaviours and interactions mean the most to your business? Jot these down as they will dictate how you’ll fashion your CRM settings and reports.

Secondly, define your ideal customer(s), perhaps in the form of buyer personas. This information is not only valuable to Marketing and Sales, but it will also understand what types of customers should be added to your CRM down the line — and what types you shouldn’t add.

Lastly, map out your customer journey. How do your customer’s typically “meet” your business? On average, how many touch-points do customers needs before they subscribe to your newsletter, become a customer, and return for more? As your customer base grows and buyer personas split off into more detailed profiles, this customer journey will start to vary. Your CRM can help you keep track of that.

Get to work

The sooner you can get your whole sales team using your CRM, the more comprehensive and accurate your data will start to be.

That’s why the very first step in a implementation should be adding users. But make sure you’ve explained the value of a CRM specifically, how it will help your sales team bring in more business — and gotten their buy in. If the reps aren’t sold then adoption will be extremely low.

We generally recommend have one of your top salespeople to act as an advocate. If their successfully using the CRM, the rest of the team will naturally follow suit.

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Here at Birdy, we give you far more features and much more flexibility at almost half the price of salesforce (www.salesforce.com/uk/editions-pricing/sales-cloud/) when comparing Essentials and Professional packages. It really is a no brainer right.

No hidden costs, more features, more flexibility, for less money. Start your CRM cloud journey with us by taking a test flight.

Birdy really does give your business the freedom to fly.