Beginners Guide

CRM tools are of different kind and have different functionalities. Sales Management, Marketing Campaign Management, Enablement Management, Collections Management, Lead Management are some of the important functionalities where we get help from CRM tools.

The aim of a CRM is to offer a solution which will help in managing pipeline and the progression of the pipeline at different levels with minimal complications.

The product should ideally have provision to track sales plays based lead generation module, which ensures the team can even check at a later date the effectiveness of a sales play.

The simple thought process behind most CRM is to assist the sales teams to generate lead, validate the opportunity and take it towards closure without slipping any valid opportunity. Once the sales process is over collection becomes the next important thing.

Some customers are less forthcoming in making the payment than others hence the need to have a tool to monitor, check and do regular follow up. Once the collection is done, one can do cross selling and upselling by understanding their needs better.

All this should be allowed to be done in the tool in a simple scientific manner as that cannot be achieved in a spreadsheet. How will you track the progression of 100’s or 1000’s of potential customers and know where to focus more ? How will you know which sales campaign is giving you better impact than others ? How do you ensure that the lead has been given to the right sales person to make the sales happen?

There are many such kind of issues which becomes very difficult to manage in a spreadsheet hence a tool. So this is where a spreadsheet takes a back seat and tool dedicated to manage lead comes in.

The challenge is that the backend teams at time become too creative. They start customising the solution to a point where the objective of the organization becomes more of getting more features than actually just helping the sales teams in the sales process. The more we see the more we want, making the whole process more complex. Hence the need for fancy customisations. Does it really help a sales person in reducing the sales cycle?

The answer is a big NO .

Identifying Market Segment.

One should use a CRM to increase the reach of the organization by first identifying the market segment. You do that by broadly defining the product or solution you wish to sell, the kind of customers who would like to buy that kind of product and if they will have the needed budget to buy the same. So follow the BANT criteria here.

Once the segment is defined and the database is ready, you start reaching out to these customers and any prospective customer when shows interest can be added and moved to the next level.

The solution which should help you do the first level identification and basic verification so that your sales team can focus more on qualified leads can be done using the Lead Management System. In a Bank you need to ensure that you are only passing those leads to the sales team for giving loan who have qualified the basic criteria of age, habits, annual income, existing loan against their name etc. This is a very important step and some say that the most important part. If you do not have validated leads, you have nothing.

Campaigns

You can have two sources of data for such campaigns. Internal source and external source. Usually the data is not perfect and there will be challenges. It is over a period of time, with usage and understanding of your potential customers, your data starts becoming more relevant and more valuable.

Your remote branch offices can use their local knowledge to collect information on potential customers and pass it on. Most of these people are not visible in any organized source of database collection. So start reaching out to more number of potential customers all across. Slowly and steadily the database becomes big and you start working with lot of customers. Many are experimenting with Analytics and AI tools at this stage.

A word of caution here. No AI solution can beat human intelligence yet, hence have a way of documenting the outcome of every call by writing small notes. This will help in engaging with your customers better.

Customisation

There are solutions which allows for lot of customisation. As a matter of fact most CRM companies now a days encourage customisation. The challenge with this approach is that it is time consuming, needs big budget and not necessarily will always give you the desired result.

If customisation would have helped so much, sales organizations would have cut down on sales teams and would have invested more on software customisation team members.

One should be very careful when you start customising solutions and start creating fancy workflows. Integrating them with different legacy systems can be beneficial and at the same time can be futile as it may not give any improvement in sales productivity or sales growth.

So technically from a software development perspective, you may follow a very enriching journey without really helping the sales person much. In simple words it can be very tricky. So evaluate your options very carefully.

Many a time it may be worthwhile to spend that budget on training of your sales team, special incentive schemes and better identification and division of territory among sales people or sales teams. Focus on the basics first.

So start with low cost solutions to start with.

Something which will not take your focus away from sales.

Tracking Sales Process

Keeping track of the sales process is important. Hence you need a solution which will help you understand where you stand as an organization and where do the individual sales people stand as far as sales performance is concerned.

So a tool should help you divide the sales process into multiple processes. You can have between four to seven pre-defined steps. For a bank it can be background check, repayment capacity check, submission of documents by the customer for loan approval to actually releasing the loan. You can then put a timeline for movement of each process based on historical data. This can help you improve your sales predictions.

Random Forest methodology for sales prediction

No one expert can ever be so accurate in predicting if a lead will get converted into sales or not. It is always a good idea to have opinions of different people working on the deal to give their suggestion in case of large loan amounts. The average of their forecast will be usually much better than any one experts prediction.

No Code Solutions

This is the new trend. Many organizations claim that they can help develop solutions or do customisation without any coding. Hence the product qualifies as “No Code” solution. Well, if that was true then why do the same organizations have big services team to do coding. They should first ask them to go home. Think, validate, check your options and then decide.