Your CRM is your sales team’s greatest ally. CRMs, or Customer Relationship Management systems, are how sales pros track which stage their customer is in as they move through the sales funnel. CRMs vary from business to business—some differences are due to industry, an organization’s size, or due to an individual sales manager’s CRM preference. Finding the right one for you can be a headache, but here’s the secret: it’s not so much your CRM that matters – it’s the process your team deploys to use it. And a vital part of that process? Your essential end of year CRM audit.
If you need recommendations for high-quality CRMs to try, [there are plenty of comprehensive guides out there that have done the hard work for you]https://uk.pcmag.com/cloud-services/67398/the-best-crm-software. Once you’ve found the best fit, maintenance is key.
There’s no step that makes more of a difference to your CRM usage than your yearly system audit. Here’s how to make sure your Customer Relationship Management system is ready for the new year.
What Exactly Is a Customer Relationship Management System Audit?
An audit is a chance for you and your team to tackle the limitations of your current CRM, and make sure what you’ve got logged in your system is accurate and up to date. We’ll be breaking these areas down properly today, but as a quick overview, you’re going to look at your CRM’s usage this year, the quality of your CRM’s existing data, and the quality of your processes overall.
Now let’s move you on to the specifics.
Investigate Exactly How Your Team Used Your Customer Relationship Management System in 2020
This means firstly looking at how exactly your CRM was used this year. Investigate the number of daily records per user; tickets created and deals closed; calls, SMS, emails, discovery meetings, and site visits per week, and don’t forget the proportion of sales activities logged versus those that aren’t logged. Of course, in an ideal world, you’d have automated at least some of the process into a live updating spreadsheet already, or be using a CRM system that easily pulls up these reports for you. If you’re not investing in automation yet, make this part of your audit – read up on five automation functions to level up your CRM here.
Get Direct Feedback From Your Team on Their Experiences
Go further, by interviewing each team member about their experience using your CRM. Don’t have the capacity for one-on-one calls? Set up an online form your team can use to contribute criticism and feedback. Ask them how they used it on a daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis. Find out what made their lives easier, and what made their lives trickier too. If you definitely need to keep calls as short as possible, start out with a form and then use it to ask follow-up questions. Then simply book in shorter catch-up calls based on what your team’s form answers have captured for you.
Assess and Address the Quality of the Information in Your CRM
Your second phase is to look at the quality of the data that you’ve got stored; essentially, ensuring the details you have in your Customer Relationship Management system are verified and updated.
As you go through your system, first look out for the missing contact details in your CRM and get those filled in. It may not be possible for every contact, but you’d be surprised by what’s been missed that can be easily resolved. Human error is natural, and you’ll also need to verify that all the contacts you already have details for are still relevant too. Some leads will have switched roles, been promoted, or left the organization altogether. Find those new contacts where you can; you’ll be thankful come 2021.
Last up in assessing the quality of the information in your CRM: catch the simple errors you’ve input along the way. Again, no need to be hard on yourself here. Just work through your leads and check for spelling errors, email address typos, mistyped phone numbers… even their site URL may not have been recorded properly. Get up to date, and get ready for the new year.
Analyze Your Customer Relationship Management Processes
Your third phase? Pool those issues you’ve found above, and use this as a chance to not only correct the details, but to refine the processes you use to obtain them too. If there’s a surprising amount of human error, how can this be prevented in future? Do you need to give your team more training, or invest in better tech? Round off this stage of your audit by working to minimize these errors in 2021.
Now Tie Up Those Loose Ends
Now you know the state of your CRM, your audit has got you to a critical part of this process: get those hanging deals and open tickets sorted and closed. Your details should now be corrected, so make sure you send any missed follow-ups and take the time to address any deals that were left open or follow-ups that were missed… In short, anything that means you’ll have a clean slate for all your leads come the start of 2021.
We mean it: effective tech can make a major difference in your sales funnel. TextExpander lets teams turn snippets into approved copy in an instant – there’s more about what we can transform your team’s progress here.
