In a LinkedIn post that received a surprising amount of engagement, I made the statement “Get your CRM right, get your business right”. This translates in to ‘a good CRM means good business’. It clearly resonated with some people.
Experience has taught me that this statement is true (specifically in B2B marketing). But why?
I have already written about the value of a CRM being able to find revenue.
If your business is built around a sales philosophy, you will consider your sales team to be integral to sales growth. This is where everything is about the sales team and you sacrifice the price of the product to ensure the sale. The Opportunities the sales team has, the more sales they will make – it is a numbers game.
If your business has a product-first philosophy (where the product defines the price and the product is reduced to secure the sale and not the price), you will consider the quality of the product and the development delivers growth. The better the product in relation to the competition’s, the higher value sales you will make.
(I believe that there is a third – a philosophy that focuses on the customer. But that is another discussion.)
In either situation, there is a need to understand one thing: where are sales coming from. A growth in sales might happen with more sales people, or with a more comprehensive product. But the key element in achieving more sales is because of more customers willing to buy.
Who is your customer, what is their profile and how do you get more?
It is a fundamental belief of Headway Marketing that knowing your customer is one of the most important things you can invest marketing budget in. It follows that having a good CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool to track each customer and report on key metrics allows you develop that understanding and do good business.
What are ‘Key Metrics’?
This is where diversity occurs! For some sales focused organisations, key metrics might be about how many calls before a meeting, time on the phone per hour and then rounded up views of sales per sales person per month. In a product-centric organisation the metrics might be around products delivered per month by type. The essential thing to note is that your business is slightly different to any other; you need to collect your information in a way that supports you doing good business.
This brings about the decision: off the shelf or bespoke?
Typically an off the shelf solution will still be customised to some degree. This is how the likes of Microsoft keeps the software integration community interested in their products; they make it so that some work can be done be developers, but the core platform exists. If you choose completely bespoke, there is an impression that you pay over the odds for something.
Of course, with either approach there is a risk that over a long period of time, a once good CRM becomes cluttered with out of date fields, or ‘helpful fields’ added because someone worked out how to do it or some so obscure they distract and fail to contribute to the business goals.
So, off the shelf or bespoke?
To respond accurately, I think you need to know your business and what your key metrics are, then ensure that whatever solution you choose, you have the ability to deliver these key reports in a timely and user-friendly way.
I have worked with private sector CRMs where tens of entries were made each day and public sector CRMs that had to handle hundreds. The outstanding feature has always been the ability to get the information needed in and out effectively. The most effective private sector CRM was an internally developed tool. Its prime function was to record all enquiries and their status through the sales pipeline. Weekly, I was able to report on what mattered to my team: sources of leads, value of sales by marketing channel and also the failures by channel (and by team member too).
The summary to this is that yes, have an off the shelf system and customise it or have a truly bespoke system built around the way that you work but always make sure that it is able to deliver the reports that each team needs. Get a good CRM and you will develop good business.
For me, marketing needs to be able to achieve one key metric. What I like about this metric is that intrinsic to it is the need to capture other data:
Return on Investment by Source
To capture the ROI by source you need to know:
Cost of Leads by Source and
Sales by Source
If you can view these stats, you can also see:
Quantity of Leads, Quantity of Sales, Time to Close, Conversion Rate by Source / by Sales Person and more.
These are all the metrics that I have experienced that deliver business growth.
User Experience
And the final point is about usability.
Do you remember the times when shopping online you started at the home page and then had to navigate down three, four or maybe even five layers of pages in order to access the product you were after? Technology has allowed the information that consumers want be there on the homepage the moment they arrive.
Why? Because the easier the system is to use, the more a user will engage.
You should treat CRMs the same. When you need to be shown too many times how to extract information, or you have to manually search Excel for key data, something is wrong. When you aren’t able to report on key metrics with any certainty because the process to compile it relies too heavily on human intervention, something is wrong. And growth cannot occur.
Do you:
have an ability to identify your marketing ROI?
know where every lead or enquiry came from?
know your conversion rate?
If the answers to any of these is ‘No’, Headway Marketing can help. Having a good CRM in place that captures the right information about your customers will allow you to do good business and grow.
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