Your customer relationship management system – Are you using one? Effectively?
If you have any size of sales team and you are running your opportunities in a spreadsheet, its a red card from me that your sales maturity is down in the “undefined” area as below from the Sales Maturity Matrix. (See Demand Metric Link for the full matrix )
The other classic red card for the business is they have a CRM, often a large and expensive one from the usual vendors but it’s not well used or poorly implemented.
Opportunity management is where I like to start seeing value from a CRM system, and it should tick off the #1 and #2 reasons from the CRM article linked below, namely getting your goals in place for CRM and getting management on board.
Opportunity management can add value to working with Sales Teams and be able to offer the following minimum information from data capture and updates on Deals / Opportunities
Account , Customer, Deal Name, Value, Probability %, Deal Stage and Forecast Date to Close.
These are the fundamentals that need to be captured and kept up to date and allow for the following basic value:
- Forecast of Deals by Stage: I like to use 60% as “Quoted” and 80% as Approved / Committed, and these give a good indication of the future state of work and deals on their own.
- Account Revenue / Forecast and Seller based forecast – These can be key for tracking opportunities by customer and by your sales team and aligning with goals set for each on a monthly or quarterly basis.
- Wins : Once deals are progressed to paper work, its key to track the close and reasons for win (or lose) that will give key insights over time about your customers and sales team. These also can reflect on the alignment between CRM / Sales Figures and Finance / Invoicing if they are not tightly integrated.
While these will be found in any basic CRM, it’s often over complicated at first attempt, and just above can take some time to get right with a team.
They can also be implemented in any of the CRM’s without any customisation, expensive implementation or significant training effort.
The link below deals with some of the key reasons CRM implementation fails and the 5 reasons are repeated here for a quick read.
https://discovercrm.com/crm-implementation-failure.html
1. Not putting clear goals in place
2. Not getting management on-board
3. Going with the wrong vendor
4. Users not getting on-board
5. Overcomplicating your requirements
If you would like to know more drop me a mail at craig@b2bs.co.za
