When tracking an opportunity in CRM most systems allow you to track not only the sales cycle step but what your feeling is on closing the deal. This is very important and shouldn’t be overlooked. When looking at deals in a forecast, rating them by Gut is at least as important if not more as where you are in the sales step. Many times you can be early on in the sales cycle and the rep can get a good sense of the likelihood of winning the deal. Also if this is an existing customer with add-on business, you can have a large spread between sales step and gut.

Tracking Gut along with the sales cycle provides the team a really clear picture of the opportunity. It allows you to better balance resources and ensures you have the right strategies in place.

Forecast Report with Gut factor

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Tags: crm, CRM Basics

One of the best things about using a good CRM solution is the ability to easily keep your team as well as management informed about what is going on with your customers.  It ensures that everyone is on the same page even though they were not part of a meeting or away working with other customers.  It ensures consistent messaging which is one of the top objectives for most companies. 

CRM should automatically inform your team or anyone else you want about customer interactions.  You should be able to simply fill out a call report or opportunity update and the system will automatically notify your team.  The email that everyone gets should allow for a brief note you can add and a link to where the information you updated is stored.  No one should have to deal with searching their inbox for customer information that was forwarded to them.  It should all be stored in one central location, associated with a customer, and a link to it.

Some solutions take it one step further by allowing discussion threads.  This allows people to easily participate remotely and foster a more collaborative environment. 

If your CRM solution does not have a notify function that integrates with your email system, it is worth having IT put it in.  It is not hard to do but will require some small workflow coding and integration with the companies name and address book. 

It does require a little Shaving of the Yak but well worth the effort.

Below are examples on how to integrate notifications and the email people would receive.

Sample Call Report with notification

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Sample email to a customer with notification

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Sample email a person gets with link to record

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Tags: CRM Basics, crm productivity