Customer Relationship Management - The Key for Better Sales Management

As you look to either implement a CRM or maybe re-implement your CRM, start with how you want to structure your customer base, then define the sales process that will allow you to best capture and serve your customers based on that structure. Finally, think through how you will ensure that the new system is used, and that data input into the system is set-up correctly. Thinking through these steps often leads to a realization that a Sales operations function is needed to best use and deploy a CRM tool. Sales operations functions can span from reinforcing the sales processes, to training and coaching on sales tools. Regardless, your sales operations organization becomes the experts in how you enable your sales team from process to technology.

With the basics defined, getting into key data sets to measure and drive your business can now be accomplished. Once you start to build out your customer profiles into your sales systems, you can start to augment that data with external sources. These sources can include Dunn and Bradstreet information, stock prices of your customers, key industry data such as the number of barrels of oil produced or the latest employment numbers. With the availability of public cloud and Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence services, you can now start to capture social sentiment about your market segment or even customers. Capturing this external information, when combined with your internal data, results in a rich data set that you can use to power your business.

Some popular software vendors, like Salesforce.com have already introduced “Intelligent” computing. Salesforce.com’s Einstein technology can start to correlate activities of a customer and recommend next best action steps to a sales rep or customer service agent. Using the external data sets listed above, a company could create correlations between market trends and customer buying habits, potentially enabling them to take advantage of an early buying trend or prepare for a pending slow down in business due to a negative sentiment analysis.

Focusing on the basics, enriching your data with external information leads to insights. Capturing that full 360 degree of your customer now allows you to derive better insights creating a refined customer segmentation. This ultimately allows a company to better personalize each interaction with their current customers and prospects. As we know and mentioned earlier in this article, the customer and consumers have more information at their finger tips and have more choices than ever on whom they do business with. Knowing as much as you can about your customers, making it easy for them to do business with you, and ensuring your sales team can react in near real time to market changes, is critical for success in today’s business environment.