What is CRM? As per wiki “Customer relationship management(CRM) is an approach to managing a company’s interaction with current and potential customers, is one the best ways how you can do a combination in between accounting and business. It uses data analysis about customers’ history with a company to improve business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on customer retention and ultimately driving sales growth” wiki
In most of the CRM tools available today, sales people need to enter data and this data would be processed for meaningful strategic outcome. However, entering data manually comes with a cost. Data entry is costing your employees valuable time and energy, and the trend shows that this cost is just increasing. With today’s technology, the question could be asked if CRMs shouldn’t be more intelligent by now. Have a critical look at your sales organization and you’ll probably start seeing the leaks. Don’t allow this to eat your sales organization from the inside.
First of all, Sales employees to focus on sales, but you also need the data in your CRM to be able to manage your operations. Research has shown that the average employee using CRM tool spends about 4 hours per week entering data into the CRM system manually.
Secondly, imagine your employee who generated good sales, but doesn’t get paid out because the data hasn’t been entered properly. Shouldn’t this employee concentrate more on sales instead of spending time on entering data?
On average, only 40% of all sales updates are ever entered into a CRM. Again, the reasoning behind this is actually easy to understand. In addition, data is typically only entered at certain moments of the week or month. Either when a reminder is sent to enter the data, or shortly before a team meeting where results are being discussed. This means that only at specific moments will you have all information in your CRM to actually make good decisions.
And finally, what happens if a sales rep leaves the company? Typically, a large part of the pipeline simply goes up in smoke. Vanished, as if it was never there. You lose any progress made, and might even sabotage other sales reps who pick up those prospects and don’t know the history. All because the data wasn’t entered.
Why automation is the only solution?
The only real solution can be to take this work away from them. The 4+ hours per week spent on entering the data, and the time and energy spent on the discussion around it, can be saved by automating this process.
With advancement of technologies, it is possible to use latest technologies to automate most of the tasks. Here are couple of automation those can help to reduce the burden of manual data entry
Email automation – Email is the first communication channel to reach customer. The user should be notified when customer opens the email, entering data to the system when email received from customer. The system should notify the summary of emails received from customer with sentiment analysis. This will help sales people to further engage with customers in real time. This will help relieving sales employees of administrative work and support sales leaders in creating a high-performance sales organization.
Call Management – Imagine you are talking to customer and phone screen flashes with some visual clue to inform you the mood of the customer. Based on that you can decide how to talk to customers, whether is customer is interested or not. After the talk is over, the system should generate summary of the talk and also sentiment of discussion. This will help sales people to improve their communication skills as well. As the summary of talk is already stored in the system, further communication with customer will be more productive.
Geo-fencing – Geo-fencing is another feature to inform sales people of any nearby customers based on their movement and geo-distance. It is a virtual perimeter that allows users to see existing clients and leads on a map. For sales professionals with access to a geo-location tool in CRM, targeting and selling to a specific geographic area has never been more simple.
With advancement of technology, it’s now time for CRM+, CRM plus smart automation with intelligent data analysis.