The next two weeks are the perfect time to set up your opportunity management component for 2009. Most CRM solutions allow you to track your opportunity revenue against your quota. You can usually find this option in your profile or preferences tab. See example below. You can also specify a weighted average so you can give yourself some breathing room. This is a great way for you to see all your deals and manage them according to how they are leveraged against your quarterly and yearly quotas. It helps tremendously in deciding which deals you should be focusing on in a given month and/or quarter.

You should set up your dashboard or landing page to show your actual vs. projected numbers and list the top deals you are working on in a given quarter. You will be able to easily see what percentage each deal contributes to the quota.

You can also use graphs and charts. I find it most useful to see a simple display like the one below. If you are working with a CRM system that does not allow you to track against you quota you can usually export your deals to Excel and write a few formulas to do the comparisons and graphs.
This might take a bit of time to work on but it is really worth the effort in that you will be taking out all the guesswork in managing your deals on a day to day basis against your quota. And for managers, once this is set up for your reps, you will be able to see the aggregate numbers in the same way.

Shaving the Yak in this case is worth the effort for the coming year.

Configure Quota (click to enlarge)

Tracking Quota (click to enlarge)

Tags: configuration, crm, crm productivity

Now is the time to take advantage of year end deals. All (and I mean ALL) CRM vendors and third party add-on vendors will offer you great year end deals. This is the time to add on more licenses, mobile components, dashboards, BI and reporting tools. With next year’s budgets at risk, locking in what you might have left this year will guarantee you added value for the coming year. If you have a use it or lose it remaining budget and will need some additional services next year, CRM vendors and consulting companies will put your money on account. This way you can draw it down over the coming year.

Many of the larger vendors are offering interest free financing, buy now and pay later and new leasing options. Figure out what you can still do this year while anticipating some pretty steep budget cuts next. Everything is up for negotiation and you are in the driver’s seat. I am sure all offers will be seriously considered. Let your vendor know what you are faced with and challenge them to be creative. Their number one objective should be to make you happy and successful.

Tags: crm

Reach out and touch someone. While Hallmark uses greeting cards, sales reps can use mass mailings.

There are two ways to leverage mass mailings within your CRM solution. One is though the marketing component and the other is at the sales rep level. The marketing component for mass mailing provides more advanced features such as opt-outs and response documents. It is meant for your corporate marketing group to do fairly sophisticated campaigns and events. It requires a more complex setup. Remember, mass mailings can be letters, emails or faxes.

But many CRM solutions allow reps to do their own simple mass mailings. To do this, you would only need to setup a mail template and a segmented contact list. The mail template is simple to setup. You would write the letter/email you want to send and insert variable markers where you want the solution to insert values automatically from the contact data you are running against, e.g., names and addresses. It is an easy way to personalize each individual mailing. You then need to create the list of contacts you want to mail to. You can manually go through all of your contacts and choose the ones you want or you can set up fields to track specific characteristics of the contact such as industry, customer status, geography, products and hobbies. You would then just need to sort your contacts by the segment types you want and initiate the mailing. Most CRM solutions will have a button or drop down menu options to initiate it. You can also set triggers so that the mailing runs on a specific day and/or time.

With the holidays upon us this is a good way for you to send personal correspondence to many of your prospects and customers with very little effort. It is also a great way to keep your contacts informed of special offers or events based on their profile.

Learning how to do this might require a small investment of your time, however, once you do get up to speed, you’ll find that you are not as reliant on corporate marketing to do things for you. Take marketing into your own hands. While the Yak might require a little shaving it is well worth it.

Tags: crm, Marketing

Sales people who do not have a CRM solution as one of their core applications are not maximizing their earning potential.  But CRM alone is not enough to make a real impact with prospects and customers.  You should also try to tie in tools such as Instant Messaging (IM), Web Meeting and Team Rooms.  Besides allowing you to handle many more deals in an organized fashion, the customer’s perception of you will be huge.  Customers want to work with vendors that show initiative, innovation and sincerity in supporting them.  While CRM helps you manage and share your customer information these other technologies help you execute.

IM provides presence awareness into your organization so when you need to communicate with someone about your deal you can initiate a chat immediately.  Remember time is always your enemy in sales.  Lotus Notes based CRM solutions have seamless integration with IBM’s Sametime IM software so you see a little green light next to anyone who is currently online.  Microsoft solutions do not have this seamless integration but you can use any IM as a stand-alone application.

Web meeting software like GoToMeeting or WebEx allows you to schedule online demos and presentations that are directly related to your opportunity or contact.  It should fully integrate with the contact management component of your CRM solution allowing you to create, schedule and send invitations directly to your customers or prospects.  In order for it to be effective, it should be as simple as hitting a button within CRM to trigger the process to create the web meeting.  Most web meeting products allow you to integrate directly into your CRM solution. 

Team Rooms like IBM’s Quickr, Sharepoint or WebCenter allow you to store and share documents with your customers.  These are internet based rooms where you can easily share this information without having to deal with firewall issues.  It is bi-directional so customers can also post information they want to share.  I have used it for both pre- and post-sales support.  Allowing your customers to easily share their requirements and supporting documents is great for team rooms.  Your post-sales team can also use it to manage project timelines with the customer. 

Customers love these additional technologies which make their side of the sales process easier.  And when you are competing with other vendors, your prospect will feel it is much easier dealing with you because your interactions will be more streamlined and organized.  It impresses them tremendously giving you a huge competitive advantage.  Ask your IT person for assistance in getting these great add-ons to be part of your CRM desktop.

Tags: crm, crm productivity, IM, Team Rooms, webinars