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The challenges of online retailers continue to grow. Amazon continues to dominate the online marketplace. In 2018, it accounted for 33.7% of all e-Commerce sales for a total of USD 232 billion in net sales. According to the US Commerce Department, e-Commerce represented a growing share of the retail marketing in 2018, taking a 14.3% […]

Consistent and timely communication with leads, prospects, clients, and customers is a requirement to keep your sales pipeline full of opportunities.

As a successful sales professional, following up and truly building relationships and stewarding opportunities through the customer journey can be a time-consuming process.

In most cases, this leaves a sales professional with two options on how to touch leads consistently:

  1. Spend time writing emails and handwritten letters at your desk for hours a day. This means going to the CRM and looking up the prospects name and contact information and handcrafting a simple “thank you for coffee” email by hand.  If you’re new to the organization you don’t know what to include and what others have used before (you’re left to the wolves).
  2. You skip this step and continue working with new donors hoping to close the deal upon that initial meeting. And when you look back and see that you have met with dozens of prospects and generated a number of opportunities to cultivate, you realize it’s been so long since you spoke with them you can’t remember what you spoke about or if you thanked them for the meeting.

In this situation, you need a system that can automate some of these processes or at least make them faster.

Segmented data-driven email marketing automation creates an environment where the sales team and the customer feel supported throughout the customer journey.

As you can see in the images below you can develop organization-wide or individual sales follow-up templates that can be used to easily send personalized communications out to leads and prospects.

These templates merge in the unique information of the constituent from the CRM record, as well as the meeting information (online screen sharing link) should you choose.  Once the appropriate template has been selected you are then allowed to enter the unique text to personalize the templated letter based on the relationship and move on with your day.

If you’re looking to get hours or days back on your schedule, this may be the solution you’re looking for.

Everyone runs their companies technology based on the unique business needs of the company and strategy.  We wanted to offer a few suggestions on common pain points that all CRM Management professionals can use.

Listed below you will find a few tips and trick to support keep these areas maintained.

Modern CRM Design

Now that CRM’s are designed with whole organizational teams accessing the system in mind, the whole process of thinking of the desired list, submitting a request to the database administrator and waiting for that person to go through the often cumbersome process of setting up a query and then exporting that data into a usable report.

Using List Views

Sometimes a change in verbiage reflects a larger shift in functionality and this has certainly been the case in CRM’s now referring to queries as views.

I’ll review how you can look at CRM software views as a tool to support productivity with your salesforce processes.

Even if you try on the two words, you immediately sense the difference.

Queries sound scientific and serious, while views sound expansive and inviting.

It’s a shift from having to mine to extract hard to get at information to simply open the shutters to reveal what is already there in all its potential.

As designers have simplified CRM user interfaces across the board, one of the biggest changes has been the recognition that it shouldn’t take a special skill set to see data organized into subsets and lists.

Thankfully all of the cumbersome steps required in the past are no more!

They have been replaced by simple filters that can yield specific results in seconds within the same window the user is currently accessing.

These list views can then be acted upon immediately, such as sending out a mass email to a particular group, or they can be used to generate reports that can then be automatically updated.

List views can also be saved locally so users can simply click on a drop-down menu to bring up a specific filtered group.

Views are unique to each user, you can keep what is relevant for you in your particular role without cluttering up the system with a mass of views.

In addition, you can switch views between tasks so that you don’t have to pull up a report and consider it alongside what you are trying to do, the view that is most relevant to your task is simply what you choose, see, and work within.

When you are done with the task you just simply revert to the regular view.

All this leads to much more efficiency in executing tasks, running reports, sending email and social campaigns, and organizing your activities.

Want to see a list of all the leads you have not contacted in the last quarter so you can send them a quick email?

Wondering how many proposals are in the closed/won stage so you can use that information for a budget update? Just use views to give you those lists with ease.

Even the actual search criteria options have become both more refined and more broadly responsive to how different users might think to search.

For instance, you could look up all the records that “contain” a particular word within a particular field to generate a list.

The sophistication of queries remains, but with a far more intuitive process.

Queries were one of the great hindering factors in the democratization of the CRM for nontechnical users, isolating a seemingly inaccessible mountain of data and allowing only the most technical of climbers access.

The shift toward powerfully intuitive list views should not be underestimated.

One is that your whole business becomes more open, efficient, and connected because more people are actually using your CRM.

The other is that everyone is then using data to drive the key decisions and actions that empower your sales team and business goals, and that is where the real gain lies.

CRM software makes another leap – enjoy the view!

 

System And Record Coding (Don’t Over Do It)

As we’ve worked with dozens of companies over the years one of the first things I do is take a look at their code tables.

This truly lets me know where the business is and how organized their data is.

Trying to convince yourself that “your business is SPECIAL.”  Like my second in command in my last job used to tell me

“It’s Not Always About You.”

I would love to have a conversation with anyone in business about how much of their work isn’t even supporting their sales and customer journey.

Look at your coding and how you look at the tasks your company is executing.

In some cases, companies have finally let go of work and tasks they have been performing for a year when we put their work under this kind of lens.

If you want to truly measure what your business is doing, you should be asking yourself with each activity you perform in your business “is it in related to”:

Is this one of the listed below:

  • Identification
  • Cultivation
  • Solicitation
  • Stewardship?

Managing And Tracking Data And Report Requests In Your CRM

I recently had the opportunity to stop in on a Facebook Page for CRM users and a new CRM system manager was discussing how she had an immediate report request from her boss and needed a little help.

Well after I provided the answer another user jumped on and discussed how she was making the industry more difficult for other because she did not force the person making the reporting request wait 7 days to deliver it.

I totally understand this person point of view and for a time I believed it myself.

However, as you begin to understand that the world and business do not work that way!

Business and opportunities present themselves at any time and it doesn’t come down to the need to provide structure and time for how you work.

Your right, database managers are very busy and are the superman/women for the office.

There are steps we can take to make handling the normal pace of chaos in our roles with a few proactive approaches that we cover in the video in this blog post.

A true professional in this field takes full responsibility for their role in the company, though most of the time our role is a thankless role we have to think long-term and strategically to support the needs of all areas of the business.

If you’ve been a CRM system manager at any time, you’ve experienced the situation where just a few months earlier you ask leadership if certain data points should be captured and they say “NO”.

Just to come back later and explain they need reporting on that data they asked you not to collect?

Staying organized and not letting data and reporting request slip through the crack has to be a priority when providing information for the company.

Make sure you have a logical systematic process in place for managing those requests to keep the flow of information going.

View the video below to walk through managing data requests in your CRM and how it can make the entire business more productive.

 

There’s been a lot of buzz about real-time data being one of the most valuable evolutions within the CRM software market and with good reason.

CRM’s were designed upon the premise that we could use data to drive decision making and strategy, and we have seen that bear out first with how it informed sales, and increasingly with how it can inform program and organizational direction.

My boss actually refers to our CRM as a “decision making support tool,” with the idea that any decision we make should be driven by our data, not just our gut.

I say “just,” because there will always be an important place for subjectivity and the vision of leaders that carry with them the experience of being in the field and on the personal front lines of a particular cause.

That said though, there’s nothing more elegant than when our egos can yield to include the objectivity of our data in the pursuit of realizing the most of our missions. After all, and we often forget this, data is just a way of aggregating and organizing a human response.

In this way, there is lifeblood in our analytics and having the right tools to use this powerful information to make decisions that optimize our systems will always be far from mechanistic.

What feels mechanistic to us, however, is how clunky our CRM technology has felt to use when pulling together these responses.

In the past CRM’s did not invite human interaction mainly because their very design was a bit sterile and machine-like.

As a result, they dampened the passion of users seeking to engage them as support tools to further very human pursuits.

As technology (from AI to apps) has become more user-friendly though, we are becoming more interactive than ever with our tools and design has come a long way.

We can still be left feeling disconnected and out of touch though as we gather a piece of information from one tool or other, but continue to lack a way to bring all of this information together in an integrated, real-time way, which is when information becomes it’s most valuable and gives us the most human insights.

So when we talk about real-time data, what do we mean? Let’s take an example.

Perhaps your organization has an app that tracks students who are suspended, the reasons for the suspension, and duration of absence.

No doubt knowing this information instantly is critical, but leveraging that information to make decisions depends on how integrated that app is within your larger technology landscape and that of other stakeholders.

For example, perhaps when this information is logged it sends out a notification to all teachers alerting them to the student’s change in status and asking them for follow up actions such as posting homework assignments for that student for the days missed in advance of the absence.

If your app is integrated with your CRM, you can have that incident information flow directly into your larger data pool to allow you to use reporting to track overall suspension rates week to week or year to year so you can track triggering event trends by types for example.

Perhaps you find there is an uptick in kids suspended for bullying, or perhaps more drug-related activity starts to become apparent.

This informs what interventions or changes the school might take to address suspensions overall in real-time, and if this report is automatically emailed quarterly to other community agencies it can serve to inform their perspective and potential responses.

So even in this simple example, leveraging real-time data can have both short-term and longer-term impacts within multiple areas of your organization’s sphere of influence.

We were recently working with a community foundation and had the chance to see another example of how real-time data was bringing valuable returns.

They were able not only to be on top of what their own data was telling them in real-time (thanks to their CRM and a few other well-integrated tools working together), but could compare data across their grant partners, constituents and staff, as well as across different areas of funding so that their whole community benefitted from relevant, timely reporting about what might be working or not working to achieve common goals and outcomes.

They were also able to share that data with funders as programs were being implemented allowing their stakeholders to feel connected and relevant to the work they are supporting.

This kind of active reporting encouraged continued involvement with the foundation and engaged their board members and committees in a similar way with up to date dashboards offering simple, but compelling visual presentations of current data.

Even something as a simple as a dashboard posted on your website that shows the up to the minute status of a campaign or event goal can be a significant motivator for action.

Executive teams, boards, and program directors are shifting from waiting until the budget season to look at last year’s numbers (both financial and programmatic) and coming to expect timely updates so they can make decisions and adjustments throughout the year.

Your CRM should accommodate this evolution by allowing you to set up simple automation triggers to pull and send reports or post updated dashboards on various areas of organizational activity.

For example, if it turns out a particular public health speaking engagement had low turnout for the first three times it was offered in Q1, and the feedback from event surveys suggest the need for more relevant content, or perhaps an alternative preference for program delivery medium (perhaps a webinar is easier for those with severe RA since getting to an event in person might be subject to how a participant is feeling on that particular day for example), these changes can be made as soon as the data reveals the necessary course correction.

Bottom line – if decision makers are automatically getting reports and results with real-time data, decisions can be made in a far more timely and informed fashion.

To achieve all of this, of course, you need the right tools, connected in the right ways.

Basic things like your CRM having easy to use automation and web forms that connect to your website and a survey tool that can pull data directly from or about an event or program and have it flow right into your CRM are some of the things you should consider when looking to incorporate real-time data.

Also, consider whether your financials are flowing into CRM so you can generate reports that can, for example, cross-reference program cost with program participation and send an automatic report to program directors and appropriate committee members or executive team members.

To make real-time data work for you, it has to function within an integrated experience where your CRM, website, financial software, and other mission-critical operational tools are all sharing their data.

And that experience should have flexible tools within it so you can you easily (meaning without an IT person) customize and add modules and fields to your CRM, or create a webform that captures information unique to your organization.

Of course, you should also be able to access all your tools on a mobile device so that your staff can input or pull data anywhere, anytime, and do things like engaging with someone on social as soon as a post, comment or like comes in to keep these conversations fresh, timely and authentic.

So it is good to ask whether your organization has the right technology landscape to support the valuable contributions of real-time data, and if not it’s a great guiding question to help you start to analyze what you might need or need to adjust within your technology infrastructure to make real-time data a reality.

It also means ensuring that this landscape is well-traveled among your staff, and investing the time and resources necessary to have all your staff trained on all your tools (not just having someone specialized in one or the other.)

With your tools and your people working in concert, you will start to feel how the harmony of engaged data starts to inform every decision your organization makes in support of your common vision.

So don’t let the opportunities of real-time data slip through your fingers – now is the time!

 

Automation: We define automation as “the creation and application of technology to monitor and control the production and delivery of products and services.”

A word that is thrown around a lot when it comes to using technology.

We would like to take the opportunity to provide a list of opportunities you immediately incorporate in your business to reap the benefits of CRM software automation in your business critical functions (and feel comfortable with).

  • Streamline communication

    • Communication with your leads, clients, customers, vendors and other segments happen without human involvement.
      • For example, does it require you or a member of your staff to remember to send recurring invoices out on a monthly basis?
      • Do subscriptions service reminders and lapsed subscriptions service reminders require a huge effort to get out of the door?
  • Consistent and predictable results

    • If reminders and communications with constituents happen accurately and consistently you can begin to develop forecasting based on the timely execution of processes and tasks.  If I know the night of the 31st, all recurring invoices and subscription reminders will go out with a link to a payment page where they can make their payment online I can forecast based on previous months of us performing this we will have an influx of revenue the first of every month.  In most cases when we perform this, we get an 18% immediate subscription payment closure rate.
  • Enforce accountability

    • If the entire organization is aware there will be weekly or monthly reporting on sales activities and they should use this to be successful at their job there should be no obstacles in their way for meeting expected goals.
  • Minimize costs, positive impact on staff morale and reduction in manual errors

    • If leadership or other internal staff members or volunteers are performing routine tasks in the areas of data entry, entering contact reports, tracking phone calls, updating event attendance, etc these are tasks that can be automated.  Which will provide a higher level of accuracy and increase the morale of internal staff members.

I wanted to highlight the power of being able to share a calendar as one example of how communication across your sales organization can be enhanced.