Rules for working with CRM for the sales department

First, let’s agree that we will consider the CRM system not an expensive electronic “diary” but a tool with which the sales, marketing, and company management departments are actively working. The accounting system analyzes the collected data and uses it to change the company’s business processes. For the sales team, the most common metrics are:

– conversion into sales, individual manager, and sales department as a whole;

– the number of payments received from customers, that is, how much money the manager and the sales department brought in, how many expenses they are still waiting for;

– the number of practical actions of managers, for example, the number of calls, meetings, commercial offers, invoices, and contracts signed.

These metrics are well known to all salespeople, but not all companies follow two essential rules for effectively tracking these metrics.

Rule number 1: linking motivation to CRM indicators

The motivation of managers should be tied to indicators in CRM and not to marks in tables, amounts in 1C, entries in meeting logs, etc. Only in this case will all practical actions and customers go through CRM, and the manager will have a complete picture of the company’s work. Let’s tell you how it works on the example of our client from the developer market.

Before linking motivation, each manager recorded in CRM 7-8 meetings per week and their results. Although, in reality, each employee held at least 15 sessions, managers only registered half of the meetings with clients in CRM. The manager had to additionally collect data on discussions in an Excel spreadsheet from managers’ words. When managers’ bonuses were tied to the number of meetings recorded in CRM, the figure increased to 14-15 appointments per week per person. All arrangements were recorded along with the results, and the manager needs to go to CRM to view the required report.

Rule number 2: a clear understanding of what exactly will be a confirmation of a user action

For the collective work of CRM, you must clearly understand which indicator will confirm the practical action. And then, based on these indicators, automatically collect reports. As an example – the same developers. For them, the fixation of the move was a task of the “Meeting” type performed with any result. The manager only chose the dates for which he wanted to see the number of completed tasks of this type and read the results in the quick view of deals.

The introduction of this rule greatly simplifies the cooperation of managers and leaders. Thanks to it, there is no need to fill out several identical reports for different managers with redundant data. Managers can see their progress and work in healthy internal competition. Additional motivation in the form of a tangible or intangible bonus for the best performance increases the conversion into sales and diversifies the team’s everyday work.

Useful metrics for the sales team

Analytics in most CRM systems is interactive, making analysis even more comfortable. You can open each figure and determine the deals it was formed. Analytical dashboards can be created independently, depending on the crucial indicators to consider in a given period of company development. Also, transform information into graphs for different departments and specialists.

Percentage of lost deals for each stage of the sales funnel

One of our favorite metrics is deal loss data, which provides a lot of information for reflection on the effectiveness of the sales process itself. By conducting a transaction through the sales funnel in the CRM system, we see from which sales stage the most significant number of orders “disappears.” And information about the reasons for the refusal, which must be filled in every CRM, gives an understanding of what the client may lack.

A load of managers

A load of managers is the number of calls each manager and the sales department takes on. This indicator allows you to track the overall workload and even the distribution of leads among employees. With it, you can detect uneven workload when, for example, one of the managers is working on 70% of orders while the other two only create the appearance of active work.

If managers additionally connect an activity tracker to work computers, they can determine precisely where time is wasted and why the load is distributed in this way. And if the burden on the sales department is significant and the sellers do not have time, then CRM allows you to automate some of the routine tasks and free up the manager’s time for processing customers.

The actual effectiveness of a manager

It is an indicator formed from the load on managers and the number of deals they lost or won. Analyzing these indicators, we came to a rather exciting conclusion on the example of one of our clients. The actual effectiveness of a manager is not only in how many deals he wins but also in how many he does not lose.

Hanging agreements

Different CRMs mark them differently, but each makes it possible to track transactions with which nothing happened for a certain period. How can it be used? During the cooperation with a manufacturer of wood equipment, within a month, we returned more than 700 targeted “hanging” applications to managers. Of these, 60 deals became successful in the same month, meaning the company received 60 sales without additional advertising costs. It is the result of customer management by managers, which is easy to implement using a CRM system.

These figures are just the tip of the iceberg. Once you have the base numbers, you can track their fluctuations under time and circumstances. And this will allow:

• see the whole “picture” of business processes;
• identify priority points for implementation of improvements;
• open up new opportunities for realizing the potential of the business;
• identify new development prospects;
• expand your financial goals.

Conclusion

Introducing a CRM system is a significant step to improving the performance of your business. But to get the maximum effect from CRM, the system should be taken as something other than a magic wand that will do everything by itself. It would help if you used it correctly as a tool for implementing changes and improvements in the company based on the collected metrics.