Let’s look at a CRM configuration in the context of how a sales manager can support the sales team.
The entire sales process should be well documented in your (live, regularly updated) playbook and should be implemented in your CRM. The ultimate end goal of a CRM configuration and implementation is to ensure the rep and the manager have visibility on rep activity, sales team activity and progress towards goals.
Ultimately you’ll use CRM data to provide a similar level of transparency and visibility to the company leadership team.
The stages of your sales process are mapped in your CRM and should be closely monitored to make sure the reps are sticking to the process, and using the stages correctly. Nobody should add stages without a discussion with the sales leadership team. This sounds pretty obvious, but it happens and it causes issues. All the process stages in your CRM are there to reinforce your process messaging and to track pipeline movement and management.
This enables you to accurately forecast and project likely outcomes but for your reps it also means they can optimize their day which comes back to team productivity. Knowing that they should be all over their forecasted deals and know what it takes to close them so there are no surprises, then moving back down along their funnel enables them to focus time and effort on the right things at the right time for the right outcome.
If you’re tracking the right metrics in your CRM you’ll know what activities to take. Say, if you know you need to have 3x your pipeline to hit your numbers, and pipeline creation is down, then you’ll need to have your reps creating pipeline based on leads or outbound demand generation activity to have a chance of success.
There should be a level of detail recorded in each ‘deal’, in that notes and activities are clear for anyone to see. This should provide a way for someone to step into the CRM and get an idea of what has been done so far on each account and the next action to take. The customer information noted here can be very valuable to other teams, for example marketing may want to contact your champion at a company to discuss product feedback, or your customer success or account management teams will want to get an understanding of the customer profile to engage better with them. Providing this kind of detail will help you build valuable relationships with other teams and everyone will benefit.