A CRM solution is an essential part of your company’s digital transformation. You can eliminate redundant interactions, departmental silos, and customer frustrations. You can maintain all your customer data on one central platform. And you can create new assets like dashboards, visualizations, and apps with incredible speed.

For example, your sales team leads can view individual interaction maps and know exactly where prospects are in your funnel. You can track each prospect’s unique paths through your marketing and sales pipeline.

Most importantly, you can use a CRM to develop and maintain long-lasting customer relationships.

Define your CRM needs

Before committing to a CRM solution, identify the business needs it should address. Determine the aspects of your current sales and marketing system you want to maintain. Next, ask yourself which goals you’d like to accomplish. And finally, answer these critical questions: 

• How do you currently track marketing prospects and sales leads? 
• How do you manage ongoing customer/client relationships?
• Do you use the same CRM software for all front-end operations? 
• What redundancies exist between your current systems? 
• What will it take to switch CRM platforms?
• Which new technologies do you want to leverage? Consider customized dashboards and visualizations, app development and deployment, and AI data analysis, forecasting, and machine learning.

Once you’ve answered these questions, here’s what you need to do next to get started. 

1. Assemble a cross-functional team

Because your CRM software will affect a wide array of stakeholders, you need a cross-functional needs assessment team. This group should represent senior leadership, middle managers, and the front-end staff who will use your new CRM every day. Invite specialists like IT people and CRM admins – as well as generalists and creative thinkers.

Choose a leader for this group who has an excellent understanding of all your customer-facing operations. This person will take responsibility for the project, ensure team member accountability, and deliver a data-backed decision. Consider operations or data managers, sales leaders, or IT leads for this position. Most of all, this person should balance details with general perspectives and have excellent communication skills.

2. Collect feedback from future users

Your new CRM software will integrate all your front-facing operations into one system, so touch base with everyone who will use it. Have leaders ask their teams what functionalities they value in your current system, what customer experiences they wish you could offer, and what workflows and interactions they wish you could track?

Create a comprehensive needs list like this:

• Secure customer data management
• Lead management
• Project management
• Workflow automations, integrations, and customizations
• Sales automations like product and price catalogs, quote books, territory management, etc.
• Marketing automations like campaign management, email marketing, lead scoring, etc.
• Data analytics and reporting
• Mobile CRM access
• Data management during the transition to this new CRM
• User training and ongoing support
• Implementation requirements and total cost of ownership

3. Analyze and synthesize feedback

Meet with a small group of stakeholders and parse your feedback data.  Look for similarities between  ideas, issues, and feature requests that may signal important trends. Group these into categories such as important features, cost and licensing, scalability, integrations, and support.

4. Prioritize your CRM needs and wants

Choose a CRM solution that meets the needs of your customer-facing teams. As you review your analysis, differentiate between each department’s “must-haves” and “wants.” Look beyond the needs of any single group to be sure your new CRM is easy to scale up as your business requirements grow and change.

Assess CRM vendors

To properly assess all the CRM solution vendors available, consider some key questions, including: 

• Which one offers the right mix of features for your organization of all the CRM companies out there?
• Which CRM tool allows access to real-time customer relationship data?
• Which contact management suite tears down the invisible barriers between your marketing, sales, and support teams? 
• Does your CRM software map interactions in real-time so your team members can speak with confidence and relevance? For instance, your sales manager may want to follow up with current customers to track relationships.
• And most importantly, how will your new system protect your customer’s personal information?

5. Identify solutions that fit your needs

Every department will need different features from your CRM. For example, your: 

• Marketing teams may want CRM features like custom dashboards and detailed lead management visualizations. 
• Sales managers may want to know how far prospects have progressed through your sales pipeline. 
• Content creators may require clearer perspectives on the email and workflow builder, and its content creation interface.

By determining all the features your company needs, you can compare CRMs and make the best decision for your company. 

6. Keep an eye out for CRM costs

Big names don’t mean big savings and every feature you require. Some legacy CRMs may include features that don’t meet your business needs. Alternatively, these older CRM solutions may not have the new technologies necessary to increase your market share.

CRM providers typically offer tiered pricing per user that facilitates scaling. However, look out for hidden fees and ensure the features you want are in the tier you choose.

7. Hop on trials and demos

After comparing the benefits of the CRMs on your list, pick two or three to examine in depth. The most efficient way is to schedule live demos and sign up for free trials.

Have your tech team test out integrations, customizations, and add-ons. Ask your marketing team which CRMs provide the conversion statistics they need to get the most from your ad budget. Have sales teams test out custom ticket automations and role-based permissions.

8. Remember these essential CRM characteristics

As you’re testing potential CRM solutions, consider the following essential factors that may matter most for everyday use:

• Implementation—Choose someone who understands team workflows and tech logistics to create a new CRM implementation plan. Although you probably want a CRM software suite with comprehensive functionality across many departments, you also need a CRM system that integrates with your existing software and data.
• Adoption rate—While a CRM software suite with comprehensive functionality across many departments is a wise choice, you also need a CRM system people will actually use. According to this 2019 report, experts differ on the causes of low adoption rates, such as bad experiences, poor onboarding, and negative preconceptions. However, the data shows that users engage more with systems that are easy to use, and include mobile apps.
• Customization and workflows—Even though a particular CRM software package may look like the right one on the surface, be sure to dig deeper, so have your teams test the limits of dashboard customizations, email design tools, and analytics.Make sure your new CRM can handle everything your teams throw at it during their daily workflows. Do a few test runs with salespeople playing the part of customers. That way, you’ll know you’re making the right choice.
• Support—A CRM system is only useful to your organization if users can quickly and easily get the help they need. From salespeople to tech people, everyone eventually needs help. Be sure the CRM you choose provides comprehensive customer service and support.
• Integration: A unified platform—You can save big bucks with a single, unified CRM solution that eliminates redundancies and helps you create efficiencies. However, integrating all your client-facing operations into one system can be difficult. So have your tech teams work closely with team leads to ensure your CRM can deliver on its all-in-one promises long before deployment day.
• Scaling and growth—Your CRM is the central hub of your customer-facing operations. Adopting new CRM software can put a massive strain on your teams. Be sure the platform you choose will easily scale to your growth. That way, you’ll avoid massive headaches by not having to change CRMs every time you expand.
• Smooth transitioning—Your new CRM software should seamlessly integrate with a wide array of third-party applications. Make sure your CRM works well with the tools you use now and the tools you’ll rely on as you scale up.Of course, your CRM will also need to integrate with your existing system. It’s crucial to preserve your current customer relationship data as you transition to a single, unified CRM.
• Compliance—Your organization needs to show it meets all current digital privacy requirements for the countries in which you’ll be operating. Be sure the CRM software you choose has powerful and up-to-date customer information protections. Nothing matters more than building and maintaining customer trust, so your CRM should be able to support those goals.
• Ease of use —Although your team needs to feel comfortable using your new CRM platform, consider how it looks to your customers. Find out if their experience is pleasant? Does your CRM software feel intuitive? Have team members play the role of the customer. They’ll learn a lot about each CRM’s UX by opening emails, clicking through funnels, and filling out forms.

9. Choose the best CRM system

Ultimately, you need to discover what feels right for your workflow and your teams. Take your time, test potential new CRMs, and check in with your colleagues. Together, you’ll find a set of tools that supports all your organization’s front-facing teams.

Marketing, sales, and support teams love a unified CRM

Insightly provides the versatility you need to quickly and easily scale your operations.

With Insightly, integration and dashboard customization are a snap. Our users appreciate our massive suite of relevant and powerful tools. Insightly’s adoption rates are incredibly fast because people enjoy using our tools.

Rely on Insightly for everything from broad-scope analytics to single-customer views. Our CRM software gives you unparalleled perspectives on your most precious asset: customer relationships.

Make us the nerve center of your entire customer service infrastructure. Click here for a free trial of Insightly.

The post 9 steps to choose the best CRM appeared first on Insightly.

And, although specific teams may deal with complaints, technical issues, and general troubleshooting, customer service (CS) is the responsibility of everyone within an organization—from sales to support to marketing and even accounts receivable.

Companies small and large are looking for innovative ways to elevate and streamline customer service. One way to eliminate time-consuming tasks and free up staff to focus on engagement is to use workflow automation. Here are a few workflow automation tips for improving the customer experience.

1. Identify your customer service automation goals

Before building your first automated workflow for CS, it’s wise to agree on a shared set of goals. Here’s how to identify your workflow automation objectives:

Set goals that are aligned with your customer service metrics

Start by discussing how workflow automation will help you deliver better customer service. What problems are you trying to solve? How do you plan to measure the achievement of your goals? Be specific and connect desired business outcomes to metrics that you already track, such as your churn rate, customer satisfaction (CSAT), or average customer wait time.

Be realistic

It’s tempting to overcompensate and try to do too many things at once with automation, especially if you learn that customers are waiting for hours or days to get an initial response. Slashing customer wait time from hours to seconds sounds great on paper, but how realistic is it? Setting incremental goals is a better approach. Think in terms of percentages—improving by just 10% per month will lead to an exponential improvement within one year. Play the long game and don’t overwhelm the system.

Use data to establish benchmarks for accurate goal tracking

Let’s assume that customers routinely complain about how long it takes your company to get back to them. Using workflow automation to reduce first response time seems like a logical use case. Just be sure to use reliable data as a benchmark for measuring progress. If you use a third-party ticketing system to track customer inquiries, check to see what types of reports are available. With a few clicks, you may be able to establish a baseline for your team’s existing responsiveness. This will serve as a key data point as you implement automated workflows that close the gap.

2. Go for quick, high-impact workflow automation victories

Goals in hand, it’s time to get to work. What’s the one thing that you can easily automate to make the biggest impact on the customer experience? If your primary goal involves increasing engagement through enhanced communication, then enabling an automated confirmation email might be a good place to start. Simply telling customers that you’ve received their request could make a noticeable impact. Keep it simple and gain momentum toward achieving your ultimate goal. Resist the temptation to tackle the most complicated workflow on day one.

3. Avoid automating broken processes

Automated workflows are not a fix-all for every service-related problem. Trying to automate convoluted systems is a recipe for failure, and doing so will likely cause stakeholders to lose confidence in your automation strategy. Fix the underlying process first, then automate part or all of it. Workflow automation, when properly implemented, should make efficient CS-related systems run even more efficiently. Don’t waste time automating broken processes.

4. Plan, test, launch, test, repeat

You need a scalable system to ensure your automated workflows are actually working and are not in conflict with other automations. To do that, follow these action steps: plan, test, launch, test, and repeat.

Start by planning what you want to automate in the context of your existing automations. Does this project actually require a new workflow, or could it be added to an existing workflow? Will the automation require additional training for staff? Think through questions like these and develop a game plan. Once you’ve got your plan, build and test the workflow in a limited environment (if possible). Do you have the flexibility to apply the workflow to a segment of records rather than your entire database? Taking a measured approach could reduce the risk of business interruption. When the automated workflow is performing as expected in a limited capacity, you can consider expanding its reach to a larger use case. After fully enabling it, be sure to test for and resolve any unexpected issues. Repeat this process as needed.

5. Use data to measure progress

Check to see if your customer service platforms offer any built-in reports and dashboards to support the ongoing monitoring of your automated workflows. For example, if you’re automating CS-related tasks with Insightly, check out Insightly’s Guide to Dashboards to learn how you can visualize real-time data, measure progress, and share reports with your team.

Examples of customer service and support automation

Automated customer service workflows can vary greatly depending on your goals, business model, industry, ICP, and personas. Not sure what to automate? Here are a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing:

Prospective customers

• Send an automated email after a prospect submits a form
• Assign a task for the sales rep to follow up within a predefined number of days
• Remind your sales manager to personally check in on any deals greater than $5,000

New customers

• Auto-convert closed deals into projects for your operations team to work on
• Add new customers into a welcome email series that provides helpful training links
• Set a task for accounting staff to ensure that new customer payment details are obtained

Existing customers

• Send customers an automated satisfaction survey within five minutes of a logged call
• Prompt customers to schedule account reviews within 3 months of contract renewal
• Remind sales reps to send out swag two weeks after a contract is renewed

Use automation to provide better service to customers

Excellent customer service can be a competitive advantage in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Strategically leveraging automated workflows for CS can help your organization deliver better service, engage customers more effectively, and, ultimately, develop healthier, lasting customer relationships.

The post How to use workflow automation in customer service appeared first on Insightly.

Many Americans who have switched to remote work recognize the benefits. There’s zero commute and a comfortable work environment. That being said, remote work comes with its fair share of challenges, especially when it comes to maintaining high levels of communication and productivity.

Both large and small companies are announcing permanent or partial shifts to remote workforces, making the need for best-in-class technology ever so important. Here’s why adopting a unified CRM can be a smart choice for your remote teams.

Remote work challenges

Let’s start by discussing the challenges that many remote teams are struggling to overcome.

Information silos

The transition to cloud-based systems was already underway well before the pandemic. Managing business information in department-specific web applications comes with numerous benefits, but doing so can lead to data silos. One system for deals, another system for marketing campaigns, and still another for delivery makes it difficult to gain a full view of the customer journey and connect data points to accurately measure business performance and ROI.

Poor communication

Virtual meeting fatigue isn’t the only communication-related challenge facing remote teams. When business information is spread across numerous systems, it makes collaboration more difficult for staff. Instead of talking about how to best serve the customer, team members are faced with conversations about how to get data from point A to point B.

Remote selling

Selling while sheltering adds an entirely new level of complexity for your sales reps. Customers want to do business with people that they genuinely like and trust. But how can your company build trust when remote teams are operating in misalignment with sales? If your sales rep is saying one thing but your marketing emails and collateral say another, or the delivery doesn’t match promises made at the time of the sale—your customers will get confused, stop engaging, and lose trust in your company.

Distributed ad budgets

Trade shows, a traditional mainstay of corporate marketing, are still on hold in many industries and geographic locations. For digital marketers, it means more money to allocate toward email campaigns, content marketing, SEO, paid search engine ads, and other online promotions and initiatives. However, managing a dozen different marketing programs requires continuous tracking and performance measurement. Compare this to a live trade show that has one timeline, one lead list, and a relatively known budget.

How a unified CRM solves many remote work challenges

Companies often try to alleviate remote work challenges by building CRM integrations with the tools that they use. While this approach can work, not all integrations are created equal. Each team member must juggle multiple user names, passwords, login URLs, and user interfaces. Data syncs take time to configure and routinely break, which means someone has to fix them. And, there’s the security and privacy risks associated with maintaining customer data in too many places.

By contrast, a unified CRM for sales, marketing, and delivery solves many of the challenges facing your remote teams. Staff spend less time jumping between systems and more time on what counts: delivering business value. Here are four specific reasons why a unified CRM can be a smart choice for your remote teams:

1. One system for sales, marketing, delivery, and support

A unified CRM creates alignment between your lead management activities and other parts of the customer journey, such as your email marketing campaigns, customer onboarding, delivery, and ongoing support. Staff from across multiple remote teams are able to use your CRM to perform their day-to-day tasks, which means they’ll spend less time jumping between systems, juggling passwords and trying to sync key data. They can view reports and build real time dashboards in one place and spend more time using the data, instead of trying to build reports from scratch and manually share with others.

2. One view of the customer journey

Aligning sales, marketing, and operations under one roof provides a more complete view of each customer. Customer email interactions, website engagement, conversations with your sales teams, and purchase history can be consolidated into one record in your CRM. This means your remote teams don’t have to hunt for data in siloed databases. Providing a single view makes it easier for demand-generation teams to understand the customer and design new promotional campaigns and outreach initiatives that maximize customer lifetime value.

3. Improved accountability

A CRM with built-in productivity capabilities—such as projects, milestones, and tasks—adds a new level of transparency and accountability that is not possible when each team is working in a vacuum. Automated follow-up tasks keep sales reps on track with important deals. Kanban-style project boards help marketers prioritize digital advertising campaigns and stay on budget. Converting booked deals to projects in your CRM helps operations teams streamline customer onboarding and reduces unnecessary confusion and delays.

4. Flexibility to preserve mission-critical integrations

Not every challenge can be solved natively by a unified CRM. To compete and grow business, you may need other mission-critical apps. Your bookkeeper will still need a third-party accounting system to track income and generate financial statements. If you’re an eCommerce shop, your shopping cart software is not going away. Be sure to check how your unified CRM handles app integrations. For example, Insightly recently introduced AppConnect, a no-code CRM integration tool that delivers 500+ prebuilt connectors to frequently used apps. You don’t have to be a coder to use it and it takes just moments to build each integration.

Remote teams thrive when unified

Remote team management is no small task. It takes a proactive strategy, commitment from leadership, and the right tools and technology. As you work toward greater alignment between your remote staff, be sure to at least consider how a unified CRM could alleviate your specific challenges.

Learn more about Insightly’s unified CRM here.

The post 4 ways a unified CRM simplifies life for your remote teams appeared first on Insightly.

As marketers, we are the go-to people. If a sales team needs a new deck to present to an important client? Ask marketing. If an engineer needs to test new product copy? Ask marketing. If recruiting wants to improve the employer brand? You get the idea.

These tasks are on top of the marketing team’s actual responsibilities. Which are, of course, driving brand awareness, generating leads, graphic design, running campaigns, go-to-market initiatives, creating content, enabling sales, maintaining social media, internal communications, media relations, market research, working with vendors, and analyzing company performance.

Despite these many competing priorities, marketing teams rarely have dedicated project management and have to manage their own priorities.

As a marketer, how can you better manage your own projects? And, as a member of a marketing team, how can you help your colleagues be successful with project management and deliver great work and results every time?

Implement agile methodology for marketing project management

Modern development teams have been using the agile methodology for years. This project management system adheres to twelve principles that streamline software development. Some of these principles also apply to marketing.

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer

Marketers are often trying to satisfy everyone, including internal stakeholders. It’s crucial to keep in mind that the ultimate goal is customer happiness.

Welcome changing requirements

‘We’ve always done it this way,’ is a death knell. The best marketers are flexible.

Deliver frequently, and maintain a constant pace indefinitely

Marketing projects can be on long or short timetables. Yet, showing consistent markers of success helps teams stay engaged and move projects along.

Manage capacity for solo-tasking

When I was starting out in marketing, I always made sure to mention in interviews that I was a ‘good multitasker.’ It was a sign that I was accommodating, would say yes to anything, and was happy to work with anyone.

It took me a few years to learn that these are not the traits of a good marketer. It took me even longer to learn that if your marketing team is multitasking, you have a prioritization problem.

Each member of your marketing team can only work on one thing at a time. If their effort is split among projects, the chances of success don’t double.

Marketing teams must realize and understand their true capacity. Consider the number of team members, their expertise, and their hours available. This will determine exactly how many projects your team can take on. The goal is not to do less work, it’s to stay focused on tasks and initiatives that matter the most and do them well.

Integrate and communicate

With competing priorities and interests, marketing teams can become siloed. A marketing analyst might never interact with a field events marketer, for example. Yet, their goals and objectives may align closely. The opportunities to align your team will ease the collaborative project management process.

Work with your colleagues to identify gaps in your marketing project process. With ongoing remote work, there may be some gaps that you aren’t able to see at first glance. Once these are identified, the team can find opportunities to align. This could mean weekly standups, or it could mean a centralized repository for marketing assets. If your team is struggling being apart, it might mean a weekly Zoom that has nothing to do with work at all.

Practice ruthless prioritization

Without multitasking, we force marketers to prioritize. We all know this means that something must come first, but it also means something must come last.

Here are some questions to ask yourself when deciding what not to work on:

If I don’t do this task, will it create a bottleneck?

Is someone relying on you to complete this task so they can begin their work? If so, prioritize it. If not, postpone it.

Will this task take a long time?

Can you accomplish two or more other tasks in the time it would take you to do this task? If so, prioritize the shorter tasks, and postpone the time-consuming task.

If I postpone this task now, will it snowball into something bigger?

Will postponing this task create more work for you in the future? If so, prioritize the task. If not, postpone the task.

Ruthless prioritization is often just that: ruthless. Marketing project managers may upset stakeholders when they deprioritize a project. Though it may be unpleasant, it’s a crucial part in being able to achieve marketing goals.

Learn to love the backlog

Many marketers are ‘type-A.’ We love a checklist. We love feeling a sense of accomplishment. We love the feeling of stepping back and saying ‘job well done.’

This is rarely the reality on a marketing team. Even if you’re celebrating a big launch or a historic sale, there’s never a true sense of completion. Marketing is continuous.

As the backlog grows, it can start to overwhelm. It feels like you’re staring into your refrigerator and every food item is going bad at once.

Accept that the backlog isn’t a refrigerator—it’s a deep freezer. It’s where ideas, tasks, and initiatives can live for months or years. You can store something in there while you’re working on something else. Or, you can let something fall to the bottom and dig it out to defrost when you absolutely need it.

Conclusion

Marketers must adopt a project management mindset. Once they understand how to operate with an agile mindset, within their capacity, and address priorities, the never-ending task list becomes more manageable.

The post How to become a better marketing project manager appeared first on Insightly.

Over the past year, marketing teams have become increasingly remote, asynchronous, and autonomous. But, it wasn’t just COVID-19 that set us on this path. As marketing functions have increased their scope of responsibility, teams have become fragmented.

Now, even a small startup marketing team might consist of:

• A marketing director
• A content marketer
• A social media marketer
• A paid advertising marketer
• A marketing analyst
• A special programs marketer
• An event marketer
• A marketing operations manager
• A graphic designer
• A public relations manager

Bridging the gaps between these marketing silos is crucial to success. Additionally, marketing teams collaborate cross-functionally with sales, engineering, and customer support.

Dynamic marketing teams can use project management software to better collaborate and communicate, and, ultimately, ensure business success.

How do you know if you need project management software?

Deciding to implement project management software can be a tough decision. Often, teams have momentum with how they have managed projects in the past. Moving to a tool for the first time requires getting your whole team to change their pattern of behavior.

Some signs that your team might be ready to implement a project management tool:

Your team is asynchronous

With the rise of remote work, teams now span time zones and even international borders. Many marketers have adjusted their schedules to take care of children or loved ones. If your team doesn’t work the same hours, a project management tool helps keep everyone on the same pulse.

Communication is splintered

How do you communicate project status with stakeholders? If it’s a combination of email, Slack, phone, Zoom and text, you may be ready to move to a centralized communication log.

Deadlines are missed

COVID-19 has made us all feel like we are living in a time loop. Yet, it’s no excuse for poor project or time management. Your team may need an automated reminder system to keep them on track.

Questions when choosing a project management tool

When deciding on your tool, here are a few questions to help you review your marketing project management process:

• What works well about our current project management process?
• What is missing from our current project management process?
• How many projects do we have, and how long are they expected to take?
• How will my team adopt a new software solution?
• Who are the project owners and decision-makers, and how can we get them on board?
• Who, outside of our team, will need access to this system?
• How important are deadlines to our team?
• How important is capacity management?
• How important is user interface for our team?

Types of project management tools

Don’t dig right into software reviews. It helps to have some clarity on the style of tool that might work well for your team.

Here are just a few examples of project management styles that you may want to consider:

Calendars

Why mess with a classic? Calendars have been around since at least 45 BC. For a good reason. If your team works on strict deadlines, your project management tool should incorporate a robust calendar.

Calendars help to provide structure to our workday, sync teams, plan, and keep us on track with deadlines and deliverables.

Kanban

Kanban is the digital equivalent of a bulletin board. In fact, Kanban is the Japanese word for bulletin board. This system is extremely popular with software developers. It mimics moving cards through a process. For example, a blog post might move from ‘idea development’ to ‘writing’ to ‘editing’ to ‘design’ to ‘publishing’.

If your team works on capacity rather than strict deadlines, or includes multiple stages to projects, Kanban is a good choice. Kanban is a popular choice for teams that use the agile method.

Gantt

Gantt incorporates many teams, stakeholders, and dependencies into a singular view. This Gantt chart is a series of bar charts that breaks down into a day-by-day view. It can visualize big projects and their path to completion. Gantt works well if your projects tend to ‘waterfall,’ or have many dependencies.

If your team has several dependencies with other teams on a long-term project, consider the Gantt method. Often, this method requires a dedicated project manager.

Marketing project management software tools

There are dozens of options for project management tools. Here are some examples of the most popular for startup marketing teams.

Insightly

Insightly’s built-in project management tool can help marketing, sales, and delivery teams stay on track by managing milestones and project pipelines. Insightly collects all of your project-related documentation, project plans, worksheets, and tasks into a centralized dashboard with real-time data and custom views. You can also Integrate Insightly with other tools and external systems to ensure on-time delivery and happy customers. Learn more about Insightly’s product and pricing structure.

Asana

Asana is a beloved project management software for marketing teams. Not only is it easy to use, it also has built-in features that allow each team member to use Asana in a way that best suits them. Asana has a calendar, Kanban, and Gantt-like views. Teams can customize it for any type of project. The basic version is free.

Trello

Trello is a favorite of software engineering teams. Based on the Kanban style, it has ‘add-ons’ that allow for better workload management. Its simple design is a great fit for teams concerned about onboarding. The basic version is free.

Basecamp

Basecamp is great for teams that have asynchronous collaboration. Each user has a dashboard that helps them focus on what needs the most attention. Basecamp is great if your team thrives on status updates and communicating often. Basecamp starts at $99/month for teams.

Monday

If your team has historically used Gantt or waterfall project management, consider Monday. Monday helps visualize projects with many dependencies and inter-team collaboration. Monday is easy to onboard and share across cross-functions. Monday starts at $8/person/month.

Google Sheets

If you want to design your own system from the bottom up, Google Sheets is a powerful tool for collaboration. Google Sheets requires very little user onboarding and is simple to share across teams. However, it contains no dedicated project management functionality and would require detailed upkeep.

Conclusion

Project management should make marketing success simpler. If your team has been struggling with remote work and meeting milestones, implementing a project management software will help. Consider your team’s specific needs, preferences and barriers when adopting a project management tool.

Don’t be afraid to get granular. But, also keep in mind your ultimate business goals to make sure the tool you choose improves your team’s productivity and amplifies its impact on business.

Sources:

What Is a Gantt Chart? TeamGantt

What is Kanban? Dan Radigan, Atlassian

The post How to choose the right project management tool appeared first on Insightly.

Project management is often the invisible hand guiding an organization forward. It exists on all levels, from your daily to-do list to your overarching business plan. Here, we discuss the basics of project planning and management, and how to implement these processes.

What is project management & why is it important

According to the Project Management Institute, project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the requirements. But what does this mean exactly?

Simply put, project management is the process that makes sure that projects are done completely and on time. In the case that a project can’t get done, a project management system identifies and dismantles the project’s blockers.

Many of us manage our own projects on a day-to-day basis. We decide what to prioritize, how to communicate a project’s status, and when a project is complete. Yet, when a project contains multiple stakeholders and requires multiple resources, a project management process becomes a necessity.

Project management is radically candid communication. It is what allows teams to collaborate and propel the project forward.

Why do you need a project management plan?

The first step in project management is the project plan. This is an outline of what the project sets out to accomplish. Without a project plan, the project management process is rudderless.

When you begin a project, you’ll want to define a few key parts of your project management plan.

Scope

What you are going to do with your project is just as important as what you are not going to do. Defining the scope of your project means that you define the exact objective of the project—no more and no less.

Goals

How will you know if you complete the scope of your project? Goals—small and large—allow you to benchmark your success along the way to completing your project.

Budget

How much money do you have to invest to complete your project? How much of that comes from each team? And, how much is the time of team members valued at? These questions allow you to forecast a realistic cost of completing a project. This is crucial when determining your project’s ROI.

Timeline

When will you achieve each of your project’s goals? How will you manage the time? And when will your project be complete?

Deliverable

When the project is complete, what will you hand over to detail and explain the work done?

The steps of effective project management

Most projects can easily be broken into four phases:

Defining the Project

This includes the items above. Yet, it may also include preliminary staffing plans, sample deliverables, and notifications to senior leadership.

Planning the Project

The project plan is the next level of detail. Your project plan should contain checklists explaining how to reach each goal. It will detail the budget for each part of the project. It may also contain extra detail assessing risks and threats to the project. The project plan should be the roadmap that all stakeholders can refer to when completing the project.

Executing the Project

Once all the pieces are in the place, your teams can start to implement the project plan. This phase could take anywhere from a few days to a few years. With proper planning, the execution phase will have milestones throughout to benchmark progress.

Closing the Project

Once the goals have all been completed, the project can be closed. This means finalizing the deliverable and communicating the project’s success to all stakeholders.

What can go wrong & how to respond

Despite following best practices, project management is never an exact science. The process does its best to wrangle workplace conditions and personal motivations. Yet, project management will still be thwarted under less-than-perfect conditions.

Here are a few ways that the project management process can go wrong, and how you can respond and correct the process.

Under-resourcing your project

It has happened to everyone. A project requires more time or money than was originally budgeted for. How do you adjust when you’ve run out of resources? The answer is rugged prioritization. Project managers, senior leaders, and stakeholders must align. Then, they can determine where to allocate resources in order to complete the most crucial projects.

Scope creep

In the same vein, many projects suffer from bloat. Scope creep means someone adds an extra task, goal, or deliverable to your project. This impacts your timeline, budget, and entire plan. Good project managers fiercely block against scope creep in order to complete their projects on time.

Mismanaging team input

Delegating tasks can be a tough job, especially if a project is taking your team away from other work. It’s a balancing act to assign work to team members. It can often feel like a project might be done faster if you just do it yourself. However, clear communication throughout each detail can help. It’s also especially crucial for project managers to remain calm with their teams. This allows for a culture of honesty and accountability within a project.

How to manage projects during uncertain times

Over the past year, project management has certainly undergone some changes. With the transition to remote work, we’ve lost the ability to check in casually about a task’s status. We’ve also lost the ability to get all the stakeholders in the same room and hash out problems and solutions.

Yet, the project management process forges on, and is more important than ever. Here are a few dos and don’ts for managing projects remotely.

Do check in more than you think you should. Consider Slack, email, or hopping on the phone with your team on a near-daily basis. This isn’t babysitting or micromanaging. Checking in is a crucial step in the communication process for your project.

Don’t expect normal working hours. Many remote workers are dealing with unprecedented changes in our day-to-day lives. They may be working at night or early in the morning. This means they won’t be able to communicate on the same schedule as if they were in the office.

Do have flexibility with deadlines. Many teammates may feel the stress of competing priorities. Having flexibility with timelines is crucial to get projects completed.

Do rely on technology. You may have sidestepped using advanced project management tools when in the office. Having an in-person team can usually pick up most of the slack (no pun intended). But, technology can ease these burdens of miscommunication and dropped tasks.

Don’t take your eye off the prize. Even in a remote environment, we are forging forward. A project manager’s job is to lead the project to success and is encouraged to make adjustments along the way.

Conclusion

Project management is the way things get done. Both in-person and remote work requires people dedicated to this process. With these project management basics, you can start developing a clearer method for your team.

Sources:

How to Write a Comprehensive Project Management Plan [+ Examples]. Midori Nediger. Venngage. July 10, 2020.

What is Project Management? Project Management Institute.

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While all of these definitions may be partially correct, business development, in its purest and simplest form, encompasses any activity or team that accelerates growth beyond its current pace. Highly effective business development teams align with senior management to identify, prioritize, and implement incremental growth opportunities.

In this post, we’ll explore how a CRM can supplement biz dev efforts by streamlining sales development, relationship management, and capacity building.

3 CRM use cases to support business development

For purposes of discussion, let’s assume that you’re the business development leader at a mid-market manufacturing company. Your leadership team has tasked you with the job of doubling revenue within eighteen months. What’s your first move?

Luckily for you, your organization uses a cloud-based CRM. Users are well-trained and actively use the system, which means you have a wealth of data and insights at your fingertips. After analyzing the data and considering all of your options, you sequence three cards on your kanban board.

1. Entry into an adjacent market

Although the vast majority of your existing revenue is from the automotive industry, you can’t help but notice the occasional outlier lead. In fact, your sales team has been tagging all non-automotive leads in your CRM in case someone ever decided to do something with them. (That’s you.) Further review uncovers a very interesting trend. That is, about half of your non-automotive inquiries originate from the boating and marine industry.

How a CRM helps: Tagged records accelerate your ability to identify data-driven, real world market opportunities without wasting time on gut feelings. Drag and drop reporting makes it easy for you to analyze audiences, understand each lead’s inquiry, and drill down for further insights. At-a-glance contact information within the lead record provides a convenient way to re-engage old leads when validating assumptions.

And, if the market is deemed viable, your CRM enables a rapid ramp up of sales activity. For identical sales processes, an existing pipeline could be applied with a few clicks (instead of starting from scratch). Built-in outreach features, such as email inbox integrations, expedite your sales team’s ability to engage a large number of leads and convert them into paying customers.

2. Increasing production capacity to serve more customers

Not every business development opportunity requires expansion into a new market. Sometimes, there’s simply more demand than you can supply. When customer demand exceeds supply, it’s your job as the business development manager to step in and evaluate ways to increase capacity. After all, customers are willing and able to purchase—but only if your company can deliver.

Unfortunately, increasing supply is not as easy as flipping a switch. Doing so may require an upfront investment of additional tooling, equipment, labor, and production facilities.

How a CRM helps: Your CRM should be an essential data source when building an expansion business case. Productivity metrics, such as project and milestone trends, offer a snapshot of existing workloads to inform complex staffing decisions. Transaction and invoice data stored in your CRM provides transparency for identifying large customers, who may be more likely to make advanced purchases. Intuitive business intelligence (BI) dashboards make it easy to visualize existing product sales trends and forecast the impact of additional capacity.

3. Leveraging existing relationships to evaluate product fit

Launching a new product is hard work and, in many cases, kind of a gamble. Will the downstream revenue more than offset the upfront cost and effort of commercialization? Pre-validating product fit with a critical mass of customers is an excellent way to reduce risk and improve your chances of success. If enough customers express a desire to purchase, non-customers will likely, too.

Existing customers also play a vital role in QA testing prior to full-scale launch. Beta testing with a group of loyal customers provides an unparalleled platform for collecting honest feedback and eliminating roadblocks to success.

How a CRM helps: Neatly organized customer records and data filtering in your CRM make it easier to identify and connect with customers who are willing to share feedback and participate in beta testing. Sorting records by creation date enables quick access to your longest-standing relationships, which could serve as a gold mine of support ticket data to substantiate product feasibility. Logging calls and notes directly in your CRM provides a convenient way to track customer conversations without relying on spreadsheets or other data silos.

Grow faster with a better CRM

Whether your goals involve expansion into new markets, maximizing output, or leveraging customer relationships to their fullest extent, a well-structured CRM is an essential part of any business development initiative, in any industry.

Is your CRM not up to the challenge? Check out Insightly’s switching CRMs eBook or continue reading about why companies switch CRMs.

Ready for a new CRM? Request a free demo from Insightly. No commitment required.

Request a demo

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Business has undoubtedly been turned upside down. As the world navigates managing operations in the Covid-19 lockdown, here are a few best practices aimed at helping business leaders and sales teams move forward in the new environment—from managing remote sales teams to engaging with customers.

By nature, salespeople are people people. While many sales teams (ours included) are not face-to-face with customers, salespeople are social people and feed off being around their colleagues in an office environment. So there are two main challenges for this group. Firstly, there are no more face-to-face meetings with customers (for sales teams who do this). Secondly, social salespeople are forced to fend for themselves at home, without the collective energy from their colleagues. In the face of Covid-19, you must have a plan to weather the storm and a plan for when the storm passes. Businesses, and sales teams in particular, must find a way to keep a level head and keep moving.

External care

As you’re probably aware, selling in this climate can very easily be read the wrong way. It’s important to be hyper sensitive to the fact that people are concerned for their livelihoods. People, and your customers are no exception, want to know you’re in this with them, and this may mean adapting to the way customers need you to adapt. Follow a few best practices:

Lead with empathy

Understanding how their business is being impacted and what they’re going through—personally and professionally, how are they being affected. Some will have to pause, so it’s critical that you stay connected. Check-in, formally and informally, to stay close to what’s happening with them and their business and proactively support them as their business and needs evolve through this time. For salespeople, it’s not always intuitive for them to think about the longer-term relationship building process, because many are focused on landing the deal. It’s critical that they focus on the needs of the customers/prospects above all else, even if that means postponing the deal. The reality is, if sales teams do this right, they will come out of this crisis with more qualified leads and long-lasting customer relationships. The slingshot effect will take hold.

Align with CRM

In times like these, CRM can be a lifeline to your customers. Make the most of each and every touchpoint you have with them through your platform; be overly thoughtful in each and every exchange whether its a marketing email or a customer service touchpoint. Don’t ignore what’s happening, but use the tools you have in place to engage with your community in a new way.

Stay in touch with your key customers

Keep in mind that many businesses will use this time to invest in tools that will enable them to grow and succeed post-Covid-19 are going to get stronger. They will be investing in tools, looking to build and rebound after the outbreak. More reason to stay in close contact with your critical customers.

Internal Support

As the vast majority of the workforce that is able to work from home is doing so currently, business leaders’ mindsets around how and where people work is going to continue to shift. A mere five years ago, working from home was often equated with playing hooky. Now, with the continued advances in tech like video conferencing and cloud computing, it’s much easier for teams to vouch for their productivity and prove that it’s possible to be as productive at home as in the office, provided you have the right tools. One critical requirement is the ability to measure activity with tools like Slack and Google cloud that enable collaboration like never before. Likewise, a modern CRM platform is the key to enabling leaders to measure productivity and to ensure nothing is dropped.

It’s also important to pay attention to your team, not just your customers. Find fun, interesting ways to keep them engaged during this weird time when it’s easy to feel disconnected from each other. Replicating the energy of a sales team in a remote world can be difficult—here are few ways to keep the team motivated and connected:

Cross-department creative

Use this time to have your team do a deep dive into different aspects of your business—break into teams and analyze a competitor, an issue, etc and have each group present their findings. This forces people to work together, analyze different aspects of your role and delivers cross-team collaboration.

Namaste at home

We’re doing extra programming like virtual yoga classes and walks so people can get energized and get a break from the stress of the new workday. I personally offer optional “ask me anything” bi-weekly calls to my team—the only caveat is both of us have to be on a walk while we’re chatting. The format is wide open – my team asks whatever is on their mind. The goal is to replicate the highly collaborative office experience we normally have—but in this new remote world we’re living in. We’ve also just launched a “show me your crib” initiative that parodies the famous MTV show—each person shoots their own segment and gives us a tour of their home and home office. It helps to humanize this experience and reinforces the “we’re in this together” mentality.

Let’s do lunch

Virtual lunch groups where people can just shoot the breeze and connect can help create a sense of normalcy and allow your employees to chat about non-work related items during the day.

Share the love

Leverage messaging tools to increase the frequency of direct communication between employees, and encourage sharing “little wins” throughout the day. And focus on sharing stories (versus closing deals). We’ve found our internal messaging system, Slack, to be more active than ever before, with team members sharing updates on good calls with customers, using it to collaborate on projects and have even used it to share interesting articles they come across. People are craving connection during these isolating times; make sure your team has access to it.

At the end of the day, it’s about thinking about ways to connect—and show your team it’s okay to step away and that as the leader, you’re in this with them. While eventually, the world will get back to business, our new normal may look completely different than the one to which we were accustomed. Things are going to be different, but with a little extra work now, you can be prepared to manage your remote sales team now and beyond.

Read more like this:

• How to use CRM to manage remote work & keep up the sales pace
• 4 steps to building a unified business approach in 2020
• 7 ways to adapt marketing during a crisis
• 4 customer relationship lessons from women entrepreneurs

The post Selling while sheltering: how to manage sales & engage customers appeared first on Insightly.

In this post, we’ll explore how to foster transparency with the right mix of processes, people, and systems.

The importance of transparency in business

Let’s start with some basic etymology. The word “transparency” traces its roots to the Latin word transparere (trans = ”through,” and parere = “appear”). The related medieval Latin equivalent, transparent, means “shining through.”

You might be asking how a “dead language” is remotely relevant to your business. Fair question. In this case, the Latin provides an excellent starting point for understanding the importance of transparency in business.

Stop and consider the attitudes, processes, data, and cultural norms that “shine through” your business. Are your people equipped with the information and tools they need to stay informed, do their jobs, and feel motivated to consistently elevate performance? Or, is something else shining through—things like bad data, confusion, and frustration?

Achieving true transparency across every facet of the company

To achieve transparency in business, leaders and staff must align around the free flow of open and honest communication. One-sided transparency is not true transparency. A sales leader, for example, who demands constant pipeline feedback from SDRs but fails to share macro-level data back to his team is not being transparent.

Organizations that achieve true transparency do so through proactive cultivation, which includes the following:

Company culture

A healthy company culture encourages each team member to think creatively, actively share his or her ideas, and look for new ways to help the company succeed. Smart companies identify ways to help their staff feel valued and essential to the customer journey.

Organizational structure

Transparency cannot begin and end at the departmental level. Departmental transparency is a good start, but its impact will never fully be realized when silos exist. A unified business approach, on the other hand, entails breaking down artificial walls between teams, including sales, marketing, and customer service. It also fosters a data-driven culture across the entire company. This is where choosing the right technology to help teams align and integrate key processes and improve collaboration becomes crucial to ensuring long-term success.

Business systems

Technology decisions are often made to fulfill a specific need. A marketing team needs a way to send out special offers, so they implement an email marketing system. An operations team needs a way to manage to-dos and due dates, so they begin using a project management tool. Over time, the net result is a myriad of overlapping systems that make transparency difficult. Transparency-minded organizations base technology decisions around solving user needs without creating new barriers to transparency.

Overcoming transparency roadblocks with a unified CRM

Zooming in on business systems for a moment, one of the most important platform-level decisions pertains to CRM technology. Companies switch CRMs for a variety of reasons—not the least of which includes increasing organizational transparency. Implementing a unified CRM (i.e., one that integrates sales, marketing, and operational data under one roof) can accelerate a company’s ability to overcome roadblocks to transparency. Here’s how.

One source of truth for the entire customer journey

Understanding the customer journey is complicated even with one system. When customer data is stored in your CRM, email data is stored in a second system, and transactional data is maintained in a third, managing the customer journey becomes almost impossible.

Unifying all of your customer data into your CRM provides a clearer field of vision and eliminates complicated, unnecessary data integrations. Teams spend less time mapping fields, fixing broken data feeds, and writing code, and more time on what matters most: engaging customers and growing the business.

Centralized platform for team collaboration

Emails. Instant messages. Texts. Shared documents. There are many places that your team members collaborate. Unfortunately, when data is spread across multiple locations, transparency suffers.

When your CRM solves the basic data and process requirements of multiple departments and teams, staff are more motivated to actually use it for ongoing collaboration. As a result, data silos decrease and the value of your CRM increases.

Reporting and visualizations on day one

Part of the challenge with becoming more transparent is providing information back to users in an intuitive, meaningful, and scalable way. The mere task of ingesting data from multiple systems, wrapping it into usable reports and visualizations, and keeping data fresh can consume significant amounts of effort and technical know-how.

Organizing all of your customer data (or as much of it as possible) into your CRM is a better approach, especially when the CRM provider offers prebuilt data reports and business intelligence (BI) visualizations. Users get the real-time information they need sooner, thereby elevating transparency without the upfront cost and effort of starting from scratch.

Measuring productivity in a highly scalable way

Requiring staff to manually report on their activity is a waste of time. (It’s also annoying for your team members who feel like they’re being babysat.)

By contrast, when users have access to everything they need in your CRM—including clearly defined tasks, pipelines, and milestones—productivity tracking becomes just another metric that is natively measured. As projects advance and tasks are completed, data flows seamlessly into top-level dashboards and reports. Users no longer have to remember what they worked on or update mind-numbing spreadsheets. Your unified CRM does all of that tracking for you by design.

Shine forth with a renewed sense of transparency

Achieving organizational transparency requires an ongoing commitment from leadership and staff along with the right mix of systems and processes. By investing in the right technology—starting with a unified CRM—your company will be laying the groundwork for a more transparent, successful future.

Ready to see a unified CRM at work? Request a demo with an Insightly rep to get a free needs assessment and find solutions that will help you bring more transparency to your organization.

Request a demo

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What is a unified CRM?

A unified CRM is a software solution that combines various business functions—such as contact management, sales, marketing, and project management into one central data platform. Unified CRM systems streamline internal processes, automate manual tasks to increase efficiency and productivity, and help to align teams. As a result, they facilitate a better, more consistent customer experience and business growth.

Here’s a quick overview of the most important CRM tools and features to look for when evaluating unified systems and the top 10 benefits of a unified CRM.

Important CRM features

While some unified CRM solutions may include over 100 features, we’ve compiled a shortlist of must-haves.

• Opportunity management
• Custom data fields
• Thorough contact and company profiles
• Robust marketing automation features
• Project management capabilities
• Customizable dashboards
• An intuitive drag-and-drop user interface
• Integrations with third-party applications
• Robust reporting, analysis, and metrics
• Customizable, automated workflows
• Integrated telephony features
• Mobile access
• Lead management
• Automated lead routing for new leads
• Role-based user permissions
• Effective, reactive customer support

The top 10 benefits of a unified CRM

1. Increased efficiency, more time for customers

Through the use of automation, a unified CRM system completes loads of tasks automatically—tasks that you and your team would have to complete manually.

You can dramatically reduce (with few exceptions) the amount of time your teams spend on manual tasks such as data entry. This is because data gets populated from various points in the system, such as lead forms that automatically populate or update contact records.

Automated workflows, which we’ll cover below, save you even more time and allow your team to accomplish more. Your team can spend this extra time tending to customers’ needs and delivering a better customer experience.

2. Better customer experience, higher customer satisfaction

Did you know that by the end of 2020, the customer experience is expected to overtake price and product as the key differentiator in consumers’ purchasing decisions?(1)

Accurate data, time savings, the ability to spend more energy focused on understanding customers’ needs, marketing personalization, and the ability to form closer personal relationships with customers are all capabilities you’ll find in a solid, integrated CRM.

Those are key elements of delivering a world-class customer experience. A great customer experience increases customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, customer retention, and supercharges business growth.

3. Data accessibility and reliability

When data collected by every team is entered into the same system, you eliminate data discrepancies that occur when different contact or other data is entered into two separate systems. Everyone works with the same data, exponentially increasing data integrity. When new data is entered into the system it is updated in real time for all to see.

Plus, with comprehensive contact and company profiles and the ability to access your system from anywhere (assuming it’s a cloud-based system), accessing important, reliable data is easier than ever.

4. Sales and marketing alignment

Because everyone is working in the same unified CRM, sales and marketing must collaborate in a closer, tighter way. They are using the same data and working in unison to drive leads through the funnel. They no longer work in silos with their own separate software systems or have to figure out ad hoc data syncing processes.

Alignment across teams is critical to closing more opportunities and growing a business. Automated workflows and tasks with reminders—along with various other system features and functionality, including lead disposition—bridge the gap between the two teams. These features also lend accountability to each respective team, forcing them to collaborate in new and innovative ways.

As a bonus, storing all data in one central database, which is accessible by all, helps drive CRM adoption among salespeople. This is an ongoing struggle for many organizations. A unified CRM helps solve it.

5. Enhanced insight from reporting & analysis

Unified CRMs constantly collect data around a broad range of measurable metrics. You decide which metrics you want to analyze and report on. You gain actionable insight into performance and results against your defined key performance indicators (KPIs).

Tracking and analyzing metrics helps businesses identify which strategies and tactics are producing desired results and which are not. This allows users to focus attention on the tactics that are working and remove those that flop.

Moreover, higher-quality unified CRMs provide custom reporting that delivers insight into metrics you need to see most. Normally, these can be automated and sent to you via email or displayed on a custom dashboard that you configure to meet your needs. This enables upper management to test assumptions and make data-driven decisions.

6. Stronger, personal customer relationships

Unified CRMs store data about each customer and prospect—including demographic data, their behavior, interactions with your brand, purchase history, challenges, goals, and more. Quick and easy access to that data allows customer-facing teams to quickly gather insight into who the customer or prospect is, which products they own, and their satisfaction levels.

This gives those teams the ability to speak to customers and prospects on a more personal level. Your teams form close relationships with customers and prospects, know them by name, and personalize their interactions to make customers feel more comfortable and let their guard down.

Doing this sends the message that you’re invested in them and their personal success. That, in turn, creates loyal customers, generates brand advocates, reduces customer churn, and increases recurring revenue.

7. Mobile accessibility

Data from 2017 indicates that 87% of companies using a CRM were using a software-as-a-service (SaaS) system.(2) These are also known as cloud-based systems. They are accessed through a web browser, not an installed application that’s only accessible while you’re in the office. You can access cloud-based CRMs from your mobile device anywhere you have an internet signal or mobile data.

That statistic is huge considering that in 2008, a mere 12% of companies were using SaaS CRMs.(3) How do we account for the massive increase? Being able to access vital business intelligence and work in your CRM from home, while commuting, or waiting on a friend at a restaurant is an enormous benefit.

Users can check important metrics whenever they want, as well as take action when it’s needed. For example, when a lead becomes qualified, sales can reach out right away instead of and waiting until they are back in the office to do so.

Consider these additional statistics:

• 65% of companies with mobile SaaS CRMs achieve their sales quotas
• Only 22% of businesses that do not use a mobile SaaS CRM meet their sales quotas (4)

It’s easy to see why mobile access is such an important benefit to a business’s bottom line.

8. Increased sales conversion rates

A unified CRM with robust lead disposition capabilities makes a big difference in an effort to align sales and marketing and improve sales conversion rates. Lead disposition—or the rules that govern how sales moves a sales qualified lead (SQL) to an opportunity, disqualifies it as inappropriate, or returns it to marketing for further nurture—is a critical process in optimizing both inbound and outbound demand generation in companies of all sizes.

Closer sales and marketing alignment, insights into prospects’ needs, challenges, and goals, and the ability to form closer relationships increase companies’ sales conversion rates.

When using a CRM, businesses experience increases in conversion rates as high as 300%. (5) That number alone makes a strong case for adopting CRM technology.

9. Ease of dealing with one vendor rather than many

Businesses of all sizes are increasingly opting for unified CRM systems because they let users complete so many tasks in one, unified system. This means not having to flip back and forth between multiple screens to access various systems and retrieve the data you need from each, thus slowing you down.

It also means not having to purchase separate systems for various functions. For example, a unified CRM eliminates the need to purchase a separate marketing automation platform because you already have one built into your CRM. Plus, businesses that use unified CRMs don’t have to deal with three or four vendors.

When you deal with a single vendor, you only receive one invoice. You interact with one customer support team who gets to know you and your use case better than reps from four different vendors would. And you have a dedicated account manager who forms a closer relationship with you than anyone else in your vendor’s company.

10. Faster business and revenue growth

Rounding out our list of unified CRM benefits is faster business and revenue growth. Most of the benefits listed above—time saving, improved customer experience, more satisfied customers, increased recurring revenue, higher sales conversion rates, etc.—all add up to faster revenue growth, reliable business growth, and more dependable recurring revenue.

Use a unified CRM to align teams and better serve your customers, and you’ll see your business grow faster than ever before.

Ready to start shopping for your own unified CRM?

Many businesses increasingly feel a unified CRM is the answer to their challenges. I believe they are correct.

If you’re ready to start evaluating systems, I’d like to leave you with the following bits of advice to help in your search:

• Create a checklist of your CRM needs and requirements before you even start comparing options.
• Do your due diligence and research many options to see which ones best fit your budget and check the most boxes on your list of requirements. Then put those on a shortlist.
• Read user reviews on sites like Capterra, Gartner, G2 Crowd, and GetApp. These are among the most helpful findings you’ll gather during your research process. They provide valuable insight as well as system pros and cons from actual users, which is more useful than a company’s website. Go straight to the source and see what real users have to say.
• Don’t rush your decision. The stakes are simply too high to purchase a system that you later realize doesn’t meet your needs. Request product demos and talk to vendors before your commit.
• Remember that no matter how robust the system is, your ROI depends on its user adoption. Opt for a solution your team will quickly adopt and use.

Follow this advice and you’ll be reaping the benefits listed above in no time.

Request a demo

Sources:

1. Customers 2020: A Progress Report, Walker Information, 2017

2-5. 2017 CRM Statistics Show Why It’s A Powerful Marketing Weapon, IBM, 2017

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