When your company invests in new software or equipment, you want to be sure that it functions as it should and brings value over time.
The same is true for your customer relationship management platform (CRM). CRMs are systems for managing customer data and strengthening relationships with leads to close more deals. A CRM is an essential business tool for making more sales and improving customer relationships.
Implementing a CRM in your organization should help your team reach its goals, not drag them down. One way to ensure your CRM is performing as it should is to regularly review and optimize the system, solving issues that may arise along the way so your company realizes a high ROI on your CRM.
Optimizing your CRM is critical because the platform can deliver so much value to your business. CRMs are a powerful way to track and manage your company’s interactions with customers, shedding light on your sales process and helping you engage with customers more effectively.
When it works as it should, a CRM system is a game-changing tool for your team to:
Track and analyze deals in your pipeline
Understand lead and customer behavior
Automate certain sales and marketing processes
Organize and manage customer and lead data
Dive deeper through analytics and reporting
Sync your tech stack
But your CRM is only as good as the data it stores and the process your team uses with it. Several issues could arise that lead to less-than-optimal usage of your CRM, from poor training on the system to low user adoption to a lack of essential features.
Regularly reviewing your CRM ensures your team is optimizing the system and helps you make the most out of the platform to boost your company’s performance.
How to review and optimize your CRM
As your company grows and your needs change, reviewing and optimizing your CRM may look different. The best way to stay informed about how your CRM is helping your team is to routinely compare how the system is performing with your company’s goals.
Let’s dive into the steps for reviewing and optimizing your CRM platform:
1. Monitor system performance
When your company begins using a new process or tool to solve a pain point, you develop performance objectives to measure the solution’s effectiveness. Monitoring your CRM’s performance determines whether your system is meeting your objectives so you can identify where to improve.
Monitoring your CRM’s performance ensures you have updated information on how the system functions for your business. By analyzing how the platform performs over time, you can determine a baseline and learn what to expect from your CRM.
How to monitor your CRM’s performance
Analyzing several areas of your CRM’s performance helps you develop a clearer picture of how well the CRM is helping your company accomplish its objectives. You can track several KPIs for your CRM to assess its performance, from customer acquisition cost to sales pipeline velocity and many more. The KPIs you choose to track will be the ones that help you meet your business goals.
Here are a few other important metrics to monitor regarding your CRM’s performance:
System uptime: Any software can occasionally experience some downtime. But if your CRM is constantly malfunctioning and won’t let you perform mission-critical tasks, that’s an issue. Also, pay attention to how quickly your system gets up and running again and how well the CRM’s team communicates with you and other customers about what they’re doing to resolve the issue.
Data input errors: One of a CRM’s most essential functions is storing and organizing your customer data. If you’re frequently experiencing inaccuracies in data input and have ruled out that the issue is due to user error, the problem may be with your CRM.
User adoption rates: If your CRM is like most, it charges you for the number of users on your plan. When you have a low user adoption rate, you’re wasting money and missing out on the benefits CRMs offer. Your team may need more training to understand how to use the platform to its fullest.
Customer engagement levels: One of the most important metrics to monitor is customer engagement. The ultimate goal of using a CRM is to better manage and grow your customer relationships, so it’s important to measure how successfully you’re engaging your customers over time as your sales and marketing teams use the CRM to analyze leads in your pipeline, store customer data, and create email marketing campaigns.
2. Identify areas for improvement
Once you’ve monitored your CRM’s performance over a set period, such as a quarter, you have the data you need to identify potential areas for improvement. Looking for those opportunities is critical because it paves the way for you to optimize your CRM system and make the best use of its features and tools.
How to identify areas where your CRM usage could improve
To identify areas of improvement for your CRM, put a team member in charge of gathering your CRM’s performance metrics and synthesizing the information to identify growth opportunities. The right CRM makes it easy for you to gather that data through reports. You can then evaluate the results to generate solutions.
Some examples of areas where you could improve your CRM usage are:
System speed and performance: If your team is struggling with a lot of system downtime, slowdowns, data input errors, or other issues, your CRM may need some adjustments to optimize its speed and performance. Performance bottlenecks happen due to all sorts of issues, from poor server configuration to unoptimized network infrastructure.
User training on the system: Inadequate training on your CRM could be one factor leading to a low user adoption rate. Consider whether your team needs additional guidance on how to use your CRM.
Sales and revenue generation: Your CRM impacts your company’s sales and revenue, and naturally, you want it to have a positive impact. By analyzing sales data and measuring the impact of your marketing campaigns, you can identify how much your CRM is helping your company drive revenue.
System features: Maybe you’ve been using your CRM for several months and realize it just doesn’t help your team achieve what you thought it would. There might be some additional CRM features you can add to your plan that will help you reach your goals.
All The Features You Need In a CRM That’s Easy to Use
Explore all of our features, from sales automation to lead attribution.
After identifying areas for improvement, your team can take the necessary steps to optimize your use of the CRM system. You may need to make some adjustments at the level of your team and CRM users, while others might be a system-wide modification.
While your business doesn’t have ultimate control over the system’s user interface, functionalities, and other settings, you should always see your CRM’s customer support team as a valuable resource for working through any issues you encounter. Whether it’s surfacing a system glitch or identifying how to best use your CRM’s tools, the support team should be there to help your business optimize the CRM.
How to optimize your CRM system’s settings
Follow these steps to make your CRM the best it can be:
Get help with any technical issues: Some technical problems with your CRM may be too complicated for your team to solve by simply altering their process. Try connecting with your CRM’s support team to see if they can help you get to the root of the issue. You may even help your CRM’s support team squash a pesky bug, update the user interface, or solve a larger issue that makes the platform easier to use for everyone!
Consider all your feature and integration options: If you need something that your system doesn’t seem to be providing, there may be an additional CRM feature or software integration that can help you bridge the gap. See what other functionalities your CRM offers that you can use to achieve your goals.
Track KPIs through reports: Your CRM’s reporting features need to be robust enough to help you measure the system’s effectiveness. Through advanced CRM reporting, you can track KPIs like lead volume, sales team productivity, and much more. If your reports aren’t providing the information you need, you may need to adjust the reporting settings or create custom reports.
Invest in training: Even the easiest-to-use CRM may come with a learning curve as your team navigates the new system and learns the ropes. Invest in thorough training so your team members can feel comfortable in the platform and learn how to take full advantage of its features and tools.
Nutshell is the ideal CRM for driving a high ROI
When it comes to managing your CRM, continually assessing its success is vital. Monitoring your system’s performance through KPI and error tracking, generating reports to identify where you can improve, and optimizing your system through training and technical support can ensure that your CRM is providing value to your team and generating the most revenue possible.
