CRM Best Practices

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The Rep-Friendly CRM

Do Your Sales Reps Hate CRMs? Ask your sales team how they feel about CRMs and the response is probably fairly consistent. They are a necessary evil. Why do they feel this way? Here are a few reasons:

• Perceived busywork - Sales reps have to enter information about their actitivities, log opportunity information, update customer contact information, and don't always get any value from it.
• Big brother - CRMs can make sales reps feel as if their every task is being micromanaged.
• Can't find information - Many sales tracking tools tend to focus on forcing sales teams to adhere to reporting, but few help the individual rep sell more.
• Doesn't drive new business - Most CRM activities involve what you're doing, not what you're doing next. They often don't provide a way to continue to market to your leads and existing customers.
• Inflexiblity - Many CRMs force you to adhere to their conventions and when you want to change it to fit your business, they charge you for it.

So how do you change their minds?

Make Entering Sales Data Easier

Besides prospect, account, and contact data, the most important information is going to be driven by sales activities. That includes customer calls, emails, task status, etc. If it takes a lot of effort for a rep to enter data, it won't happen. Let's say they call a customer, but the customer's not interested right now. Are they going to take the time to record that information, or will they move on to the next prospect? If their performance is based on sales and not data entry, they will almost certainly skip logging that activity, even though you know that that's still a good prospect at some point. LongJump provides a single call and opportunity log screen to record everything from customer information updates, opportunities, and next steps, putting better information about activities into the CRM.

Valuable Information to Understand Customer Needs

The best way for a rep to sell is by understanding the profile of who his customers are and how to strategically go after them. This means having good information about each customer and creating daily tasks that focus on those customers. Whether it's by ZIP code or last date of purchase, LongJump provides the ability to slice and dice their customer data to find the best targets or discover new untapped markets

Let Reps Measure Their Own Sales Progress

We're all a competitive in the business world -- especially salespeople. That's the point of quotas and commissions. LongJump provides an easy way to build reports and personalize their dashboards so reps see how their doing against their quota, or even against other reps.

Enable Reps to Re-Market to Their Contacts

Campaigning has traditionally been used as a marketing tool, but in many ways, it's most valuable as a sales tool. LongJump lets you create and deliver personalized email campaigns so reps can cover a lot of territory but still maintain a certain level of 1-to-1 selling. With a few targeted messages, automated follow-ups when the reader clicks or opens an email, and the ability to customize emails to fit the call to action, sales teams can drive a lot more opportunities more efficiently.

Design and Automate Best Practices

We all want to accomplish as much as we can with as little work as possible. That gives us time to deal with the more complex issues or to try new things, which can take us to the next level. LongJump lets you create data policies as a great way to automate common functions. For example, if a new prospect is introduced and there is data indicating their interest in "Trucks," a completely differ selling process can start for that prospect.

Salespeople don't really hate CRMs. They hate that they don't work like they do. The more focused a CRM can be towards the plight of the salesperson, the more successful your CRM implementation will go. And once you win them over, they won't be able to live without it.