Why You Need CRM: “You Lost. Now What?”
“Good job team, we lost!” said no one ever. Whether it’s losing a bet with your spouse or not having enough funds to buy the boardwalk in Monopoly, no one likes losing. Assuming you want your business to thrive rather than take a nose dive in 4th quarter then read on.
Dollars and Cents
The above scenarios can sting for a moment, but eventually life goes on. However, nothing hurts quite like losing revenue when it’s your business and your paycheck is at stake. If you don’t have a CRM system right now then how do you know you’ve done everything possible to win the deal? Have you realized, let alone presented up or cross sale products? What about next month? What opportunities do you need to “zero in on” to hit your quota?
A CRM system can help ensure that you don’t miss out on revenue from any angle. By using dashboards you can quickly understand the strength (or weakness) of your sales pipeline. If you’re on the phone with a client you can leverage the new analytics suite so that CRM can do the heavy lifting by presenting you with suggested products to provide the best solution.
Watching Over Your Shoulder
Losing to a competitor can keep many of us up at night. You could spend hours asking yourself, “What do they offer that you don’t?” “Did they do a better job during the final presentation?” In order to avoid this you need a system that empowers your business to leverage a wealth of data while keeping you on track so that you never miss a step during the sales process.
Recently, Microsoft Dynamics CRM introduced CRM business process flows (see figure 2 below) as the tool to standardize your sales processes. Business process flows allow users to setup a custom set of required and non-required stages to complete. As a user completes these steps they are able to move forward to following stages (across entities if necessary). This fantastic customization takes no development skill, and allows for multiple processes for each individual entity in CRM.
