As part of your investment in tools and technology to help your sales team, you’ve brought in a CRM.
There’s a good chance that the initial setup was done, at least in part, to show you have a documented sales process. Then over time adding a step here and a stage there and extra fields mean it may have become bloated with admin. Using the Good Fit Sales approach, we strip away complexity and build a transparent process into the CRM that removes that admin burden on reps.
As a manager it’s your responsibility to continually look for ways to reduce that admin burden so sales can keep selling.
Too often, when other teams get involved that’s when requests for information come in. Like finance want a payment terms field added, marketing wants a deal source, and so on. These are all great to have but the priority is always to automate and avoid manual data entry. If you can’t automate then you have to weigh up the value of having the data vs the value of sales rep time, considering when that adds up for each opportunity in their pipeline and starts to fill the time they could be spending on demos and calls.
A CRM – when used correctly – is an invaluable aid to sales reps and sales managers but too often it’s poorly set up and overly complex.
And what happens? Reps avoid using it, and the CRM itself gets the blame.
So, it’s critical to have your whole team using the CRM in a standardized and efficient way. That way, you get what you need from it without it being an onerous admin-heavy job for the reps.
You’ll have a lot of metrics coming at you from the CRM. It’s wise to spend the time really understanding the data from your sales process, so you can set the right metrics to track. Once you have the right metrics to track, you can understand the right activities to be done and actions to take to align to those metrics.
So the first thing to look at after a GFS rollout is to ensure the reps are using the definitions of stages as outlined in your playbook. Then you need to focus weekly on data hygiene, for example past due close dates on opportunities, opportunities that have tasks set for beyond the close date, missing data on opportunities, lack of notes and / or lack of tasks. There are quite a few things to track in your CRM and the Ctrl.io Action module helps you understand each element.
Where you want to get to is a process of reviewing the metrics, spotting when something is off, and knowing what to do about it. Maybe if opportunities aren’t being created, you need to go back in and look at lead volumes. If there are plenty of leads then you need to look at rep activity. Maybe they aren’t getting to their leads because of extra meetings they had to attend or if they had a lot of demos booked in their calendars.
If the process is being followed, then it’s time to start looking at pipeline reviews with each rep so you can assist with sales plays and / or making calls with the reps if needed.