Is your CRM system complicating your sales process?
Tuesday 23 June, 2009

A recent discussion with a prospect along with a post I saw on one of the LinkedIn group discussions has reminded me that some businesses have let their CRM (Customer Relationship Management) get out of control. The purpose of a CRM system is to make the sales and pipeline building process easy and repeatable.  However, I have recently seen and heard of businesses, mid-sized to corporate, who have allowed their CRM systems to become too cumbersome, complicated and over-bearing.  When that happens, look out!  Remember, information/data is only as good as the quality of the information that is initially pushed through the system. Typically, sales people are responsible for updating and maintaining the input process and if I have learned anything about salespeople (I include myself in that group!) when it comes to tracking data, if it ain’t easy, it ain’t getting done.

A CRM system should be easy to access, easy to use and set up to capture no more than 10 ‘critical bits’ of information. Frankly, I think most businesses can narrow it down to 5 critical bits of information. What are critical bits? They are pieces of information that can be triggers for your prospects that will open themselves to your products or services. Of course the obvious critical bits would include contact name, address, phone, email, website. But you already knew that!  If you are selling insurance, critical bits would be renewal dates and current carrier information.

Don’t over complicate the system or the amount and type of information you collect.   To use the over-used management mantra, keep it simple, stupid!

Tags: CRM, customer management, pipeline, sales process

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 9:18 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.