CRM For Dummies. Helgeson Lars

all driven by the increase in efficiency.

       Efficiency

      Efficiency is about being able to do more with less effort. Using machines (physical machines to save manual labor, or computers to save data entry or manipulation) to scale your business results in greater efficiency.

      Some key ways that Complete CRM contributes to efficiency:

      ❯❯ Alerts: When measuring what leads and clients do across multiple channels (for example, websites, email, text, phone), your CRM can tell your sales team when a hot lead needs an immediate follow-up. Because your salespeople and their contacts are tied into your CRM, alerts are timely and contain the information they need to close more deals.

      ❯❯ Auto-responders and drip campaigns: When a lead or client fills out a form or activates some other trigger, you can set things in motion to automate what happens next, such as a series of emails or personalized printed material. Logs of these automated marketing functions are stored in the CRM, along with what your contacts did when they received these messages.

      ❯❯ Overdue warnings: When you set up workflows, or automated CRM activity schedules, you can set predefined to-dos for your team. If someone drops the ball on a regularly scheduled sequence, management can see it immediately.

❯❯ Automatic CRM updates: When software automatically updates your CRM, it saves manual data entry. For example, one-to-one emails are saved, phone calls are recorded and transcribed, chat sessions with customer service are added, videos are watched, and email newsletters are opened or clicked, as shown in Figure 1-10. Complete CRM automatically transfers this data to your contact records, saving you time and arming your staff with information to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively.

       FIGURE 1-10: When a contact record includes all this information automatically, everyone wins.

      Costs associated with labor that could be automated often contribute to unnecessary overhead. These costs could be labor, but it could also affect your team’s ability to respond to opportunities. If your salespeople don’t know when a hot lead is showing interest, they aren’t spending time effectively, which results in waste or missed chances to close deals.

       Lifestyle

      Wise men tell you that the true measure of one’s wealth is in the amount of free time available. If you can take the morning, the afternoon, or the day off and not stress about it, you’re making progress toward building a more free lifestyle.

      

Lifestyle isn’t always just about free time. It’s also about quality of life while at work. When stress levels are lower at work, people are happier. Ultimately, people are in search of more happiness, and Complete CRM brings you closer to that by giving you insight into how your business is doing and improving the customer experience. Better tools create efficiency and consistency for your team, improving morale and performance.

      Workers and managers alike feel more stress when mistakes are made. Sometimes people forget things, and sometimes they weren’t told anything about something that could have helped them do their job better. Complete CRM is your recipe to remove those mistakes by making relevant information available and automating reminders to complete tasks in a timely fashion.

      When someone in your organization drops the ball, someone has to pick it up. Usually there is some amount of apologizing to a customer, coaching for the person who dropped the ball, and a reevaluation of internal processes. Every time this reevaluation happens, the team should think about how Complete CRM could help prevent it from happening in the future.

      

Rely on your CRM to support your “dropped ball” policy. Whether it’s recording how the ball was dropped, redesigning your sales or support process, or tracking damage control processes, your CRM gives you the tools to make sure your team drops as few balls as possible.

      Complete CRM gives you and your team the confidence of knowing everything is handled as intended. By designing internal processes that react to leads, clients, vendors, and employees, you demonstrate that confidence to everyone in your organization. Confidence then transcends outwardly to your leads and contacts, building your brand and overall customer experience.

      Chapter 2

      Gearing Up Internally for CRM

      IN THIS CHAPTER

      ❯❯ Recognizing and addressing the resistance to new strategies and processes

      ❯❯ Building a team that uses your CRM effectively

      ❯❯ Creating a singular vision for everyone in sales, marketing, and operations

      ❯❯ Teaming up with IT to build a data-driven culture

      ❯❯ Making CRM an integral part of your corporate culture

      CRM is more than a software package. It’s a mindset and a collaborative effort that spans the entire organization and includes your leads, customers, vendors, and partners. Making CRM work requires a culture that supports it.

      In this chapter, you discover how to gear up internally to implement an effective Complete CRM. You develop the knowledge and skills to anticipate common roadblocks and clear them with confidence. You build a creative, collaborative environment united behind the common purpose of improving customer satisfaction and developing customer relationships that drive profit and growth.

      

To make Complete CRM work, you need your team on your side. You build a culture that involves everyone, forming a solid foundation for your CRM to grow from.

Overcoming Resistance to Change

      Change requires effort and energy to overcome inertia – the reluctance to adopt new ideas or to change processes or procedures. Not everyone will be on board right away, but if you know the underlying reasons for the resistance, you can address whatever that’s holding those individuals back.

      

In any group of people, generally speaking, 80 percent will resist change. This 80 percent finds excuses to remain in the familiar patterns. To institute a change in your company culture, you need to anticipate this resistance and address concerns that may be standing in the way. In this section, I explain how.

       Preparing for “not invented here” resistance

      One main reason people don’t like to adopt new ways is because they feel as though they’re being forced to act in ways they didn’t come up with or hadn’t considered on their own. It’s commonly known as “not invented here” resistance. Generally speaking, the more powerful a person’s ego, the more likely that person is to resist change if he didn’t come up with the idea and doesn’t see a clear benefit to make the change.

      

Make the benefit of change clear to everyone in your organization. Start by showing how what’s currently in place falls short of what the company needs. Then sell your vision of how the changes provide the benefit that matters to each person. That benefit may be doing their jobs better, making their lives easier, saving time, helping them innovate, earning more money, or a combination of these.

       Confronting the ghosts of failed initiatives

      Many organizations have launched initiatives that haven’t turned out as planned. For example, someone in the company may have come up with the brilliant idea to switch to a new accounting system that’s worse than what everyone in the organization was accustomed to using. Now, everyone is dealing with the fallout of that person’s bad decision and is more reluctant to try something new.

      CRM