The potent analytics capabilities available to sales professionals who utilize a customer relationship management (CRM) solution aren’t usually known to them. Why do we say that? Only 8% of the 84 sales and business development professionals we polled for our 2023 Business Structure Survey indicated access to comprehensive analytics as one of their CRM‘s top perks.
Here are three suggestions based on his observations to assist you in enhancing the administration and analysis of your sales pipeline using your CRM.
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Tips To Leverage Your CRM for Better Sales Pipeline Analysis
1. Don’t stuff your dashboard too full
When you log into your CRM, you see your dashboard. It displays the length of your sales cycle, current offers, anticipated closing dates, and anything else you want front and center for quick reference. Widgets like the graphs and charts in the image below serve as representations of this data.
While having access to so much information at a glance might seem useful, it can really lead to information overload and prevent you from using your CRM to its fullest extent. A strong CRM has both benefits and drawbacks, according to Mike Aldrich, a leading sales professional “There is no end to the amount of data you can extract.”
It is advised to keep your dashboard to five custom reports or widgets in order to assist you in focusing on the sales funnel KPIs that are most important to your company. “If you create more than that, you can’t focus on them all,” he says. “I once had 105 reports because I needed to be aware of everything that was happening with my pipeline. But it’s simply not practical.
2. Improve your sales strategy by monitoring interactions
You can record notes and keep track of your interactions with particular contacts using the interaction tracking tool in your CRM. Aldrich like having a 360-degree picture of each of his accounts since it makes it easier for him to make plans for upcoming sales.
“Your CRM keeps all your communication, documents, quotes, and deals in one place,” says Aldrich. So you can determine the best use of your time and where you’re getting the majority of your business when you start evaluating your history with a certain account.
For an illustration of how interaction tracking might appear in a CRM system, see the sample below.
3. Utilise sales forecasting to anticipate trends and difficulties.
Utilizing both your historical and current sales data as well as trends in sales activity, your CRM’s sales forecasting feature may assist you in making unbiased and knowledgeable judgments about which accounts to pursue. However, you must be careful while entering your sales data.
Your CRM’s ability to foresee future trends and issues depends on regular maintenance. “Forecasting is about the integrity of your pipeline,” claims Aldrich. Maintaining dead deals will make you feel more secure by increasing your pipeline.
Why CRM Implementation Can Be a Challenge for All Businesses
Implementation may also involve transferring any marketing automation logic you’ve been utilizing to carry out various tasks in your old product if you already have a CRM platform. Depending on your industry and the types of data you routinely acquire from consumers, the information and procedures you move to the new tool may differ significantly. Because CRMs may be developed in such a wide range of ways and because the amount of data to be moved can be so large, the process can be time-consuming and challenging. The good news is that CRM software creators have made significant improvements to make the process simpler in recent years. They are aware of the difficulties facing successful installation.
Data security is a problem whenever you carry out routine business operations or introduce a new CRM. Protecting information, especially customer personal data is of the utmost significance because even one incidence of security breach can spell doom for a smaller firm. Choosing a trustworthy provider with appropriate security protocols is the first step towards achieving this. Be clear about your expectations and establish the expectation that a vendor will notify you immediately if a breach occurs because even the most reputable providers occasionally experience data breaches.
Take particular care while setting up safeguards like data encryption, password protection, and data backups when getting ready to transfer data. Another wonderful strategy to prevent problems and manage a more secure organization is to provide regular cybersecurity training for personnel.
Conclusion
All three of our suggestions for utilizing your CRM software to improve sales funnel analysis depend on maintenance. When pressed about any more advice for salespeople looking to maximize the benefits of their CRM, Aldrich responds, “You have to put the effort in. Logging in at the beginning of the day will help you determine what chores to prioritize. It will display your progress toward your monthly, quarterly, or yearly sales targets as well as the deals you anticipate concluding shortly.
At the end of the day, update your notes with anything that occurred, including presentations, conversations, and events. And finish the transactions that aren’t working. It becomes a huge paperweight on your desk that does nothing if you aren’t careful with it.
Consult a business intelligence (BI) provider if you don’t have the necessary tools or resources to examine your sales data or if it is dispersed across multiple systems and you are unsure of how to centralize it. For quicker decision-making, BI businesses assist in delivering captivating yet straightforward data analysis reports.
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