How to Optimize Your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System

Your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is one of the most vital components of your organization’s operations.

For one thing, it tracks customer information and provides reports on historical performances. Additionally, it provides valuable insights into a business’s departmental interactions. This information allows you to strategically position your business for the future.

It’s comes as no surprise that CRM systems have evolved from being simple sales tools to something more. Where once they were used only for capturing customer and prospect data, nowadays smart businesses use them as vital tools to improve interdepartmental operations.

Here is a list of some of the areas where you can optimize the capabilities and features of your CRM system to boost overall productivity.

Automation of Data

In today’s fast-paced world, it’s not prudent to stick to the traditional methods of collecting and analyzing data. Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, and paper forms are no longer sufficient to the task. Furthermore, you need to be sure that the data stored in your system is up to date. The two most important places to start with in your CRM definition are:

Sales

Salespeople spend a lot of time logging customer information from their daily business interactions. The right CRM sales automation tools will free up your sales team, giving them time to concentrate on other core aspects of the business. Moreover, the tools will automatically update the data from time to time.

Marketing

For greater efficiency, use marketing forms that sync information automatically to your CRM database. Also, avoid feeding your CRM system any unnecessary data by always mapping the correct fields and following all duplication rules.

Stale Records

Over time, some records on your CRM system will become inactive or redundant and hence useless to your marketing campaigns. When they do, label such records as inactive so that your employees can focus on accounts with possibility.

On the other hand, stale records can be great business opportunities right under your nose. That’s because some of these records are of prospects that your sales team reached out to in the past but never closed on. Most likely, the timing wasn’t right, so they were basically forgotten.

To mine these records, run reports of prospects’ records that haven’t been communicated with for a long time. Gain further insights by layering relationship data. The relationship mapping will help you determine whether any of your employees know the customers. It’s likely that you’ll be able to jump-start stale conversations and turn them into business opportunities.

Stale Fields

Your business’s needs change daily. Therefore, customize your CRM’s features to match the dynamics of your business. Do this by carefully creating new fields on your records without polluting or cluttering your stored data.

You’ll find that it’s easy to edit and delete obsolete custom fields periodically from your CRM system. Doing so will enable it to function optimally. Every six months or so, edit or delete historic fields from your system and keep it up to date.

Outdated Third Party Providers

Your business needs third-party service providers to help boost your sales, marketing, and support efforts. However, you should revisit all your third-party CRM tools annually. Delete the ones that are no longer relevant to your expanding business.

Among all of the ever-evolving tech-based business solutions, it’s CRM systems that best allow you to stay ahead of the competition. Optimize yours now for top performance.

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