Good Data and Well-Designed Dashboards Drive Better Decisions
Getting more bang for your CRM buck
By this point, we [should] all be using CRM systems in our businesses. They're the backbone of insights for sales focused organizations. The challenge I see with most leaders in the past 2 years is not always being able to get the most out of them. Let’s breakdown the tools to get them ready to work even better for you. Trusting that you are already using them to keep deal data managed and mostly current, let’s dial in the dashboard functionality. This is a key feature to making smarter decisions about your business with collective insight gathered via the CRM!
I imagine many of you may be on a CRM journey like this: you've got the CRM system and licenses, most of the team has email, contacts, and calendars synced, but we know in our gut that we are not using it to its full potential. It happens!
Data, Deals, Decisions
A lot of folks don't get proper training, or they developed a ton of habits with another employer, and you have not applied change management to those [bad] habits. Now, it's like trying to drive a spaceship without knowing the control buttons. Customizing can be a headache, too. And, oh, the incomplete data entry – it's like having a puzzle with missing pieces. But here's the deal: all these hiccups affect the choices you make in your business.
Let's talk about keeping things clean. Think of your CRM data like your wardrobe. If you don't declutter and maintain it, you might end up wearing mismatched socks. Same with your CRM. Clean data is crucial – you need it to make smart moves and better decisions. Also, deal management is a key component to getting more robust insights from the data. With good and current deal data being standardized and captured, salespeople and leaders can be more proactive, and success focused in real time for client needs. This applies to solopreneurs, small businesses, large businesses, and every product specific vertical in between. If you're not organizing and maintaining your deal data, it's like juggling too many balls at once. We'll cover how this impacts your decisions, too.
Dashboards for Decision Making
Reports are the building blocks for dashboards. For dashboards to be effective, they need to be simple and intuitive. An outsider should see and understand good vs sub-par performance, even if they do not understand all of the underlying factors contributing to the performance. A guide I use with all of my clients is this: if we can capture the data in an excel table, we can get it to a dashboard view.
Dashboards! These should operate like your car's dashboard, but for your business. A few key measures and gauges should have the ability to influence the way you make decisions and with an appropriate amount of urgency. They show you all the important things at a glance, just like your speedometer and fuel gauge. It's a visual way to see what's going on right now. No need to dive deep back into spreadsheets if performance is good or excellent. Only dive in when the gauge is in a red zone or below a threshold. Dashboards can be a game-changer.
Here's a few dashboard elements and goals that I suggest for many of my clients:
Weekly # and $ of new deals: added, closed-won and closed-lost.
·Weekly # of deals advancing to the following stages: 1st conversations with a lead, advance to scoping stage, # proposals presented (not emailed).
There should be a minimum goal for each of these deal advancements too.
A measure for network/prospecting behaviors as well.
There are, certainly, many other things to measure but this will help get any team started on managing each of the segments of their sales process. It will aid the leader and salesperson in diagnosing why and where problems exist in an individual or team pipeline.
The real value to business is in the insights that are now available from capturing, measuring, training, and developing people in these areas. Regular training and customizing it to your needs are like giving your car regular tune-ups. And data hygiene? It's like cleaning the car's interior. Setting goals with reports is setting your destination, and dashboards are your GPS to get there. They all work together to make your CRM ROI soar!
The secret sauce? Dashboards, data hygiene, and goal-oriented metrics. Let's use these tools wisely and make decisions that'll drive business forward!