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:
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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:
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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.
Follow these steps to make your CRM the best it can be:
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.
If you’re looking for a CRM that makes it easy to track metrics through reporting, gives you powerful features to help all of your teams, and provides easy-to-access help from support when needed, consider Nutshell. Nutshell offers robust reporting, a lineup of helpful features like sales automation and email marketing, and free support to all our customers.
Interested in seeing how Nutshell can help your team work smarter? Sign up for a free trial today!
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