2020 was an unconventional year for a lot of businesses. New business models emerged and businesses that have managed to shift to the new norms have been very successful. Companies have gotten used to working increasingly over the internet. Video conferencing tools and collaboration platforms became indispensable, and the CRM became one of the most important tools for B2B sales and marketing teams.
The CRM system is no longer just a contact management tool that businesses use. It has much more to offer to various teams within an organization – sales, marketing, customer success, leadership and more.
As the new year approaches, it is time for businesses to put their CRM on track and make sure their customer data is updated and ready for Q1 2021. Here are our tips to get it right.
Ensure All Offline Data Is In the CRM
Companies spend thousands of dollars on their CRM, but a lot of the data still continues to remain siloed and unrecorded. With sales teams working remotely, it is all the more important now to centralize all of your customer and prospect data in the CRM system. Business cards, emails and spreadsheets often contain valuable leads that never make it to the CRM. Having all contact information in one centralized CRM will help you to follow up with prospects more easily and quickly, creating more opportunities for growth. Don’t try doing this task manually though. It can get very cumbersome and time-consuming. Use a business card scanner app like ScanBizCards to scan contact information from business cards and export the data directly to your CRM or email marketing platform such as Salesforce, SugarCRM, Hubspot, Marketo and many more.
If you use lead capture tools and landing pages for lead-capture on your website, make sure it’s integrated with your CRM so all of the leads you capture online are saved in the CRM.
Tag Contacts and Score Leads
With every new meeting with a prospect make sure to capture all the critical information about them. The information you collect should not be lost in the pages of your notepad or in spreadsheet but should be added to the CRM as it can lead to important analyses in the future, as well as help with appropriate segmentation and profiling of the lead. Your CRM should contain all the important information about your leads such as phone, email, job title, social media profiles and so on. You should also score your leads, tag them, assign them to lead owners with action items and so on.
The CRM also provides key insights about your own operations for making decisions. For instance, when talking to your prospects, the sales or business development reps are the first point of contact. The information they collect can give a lot of good actionable insights such as:
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- Which of your products/services/features is the most popular
- What are the most common issues and queries regarding your various offering
Add New Leads from Your Emails to Your CRM
There are billions of B2B emails exchanged each year. 40 is the average number of emails per day a person sends for business purposes. Company mailboxes are a goldmine of potential leads that often never get added in the CRM.
You can discover new leads from your emails. ScanBizCards has an Email Signature Capture feature that lets you automatically find new contacts and contact update from your email exchanges. Once you connect your email for Signature Capture, it scans your emails in the last 30 days to suggest any new contact that it finds. It will also give suggestions from any new emails that you receive. The app currently supports email providers like Microsoft, Exchange, and Google. Adding these new leads to your CRM would mean new leads to nurture and to try to convert.
De-clutter the CRM
Before you start the new year, your CRM should be organized, with all outdated contacts updated and the redundant ones removed.
- Organize your contacts and identify leads that are most and least likely to convert.
- Some fields in the CRM might no longer be useful to you. Remove them and clean up the database.
- Arrange information in such a way that all the critical info is reflected at the top of search.
- Remove all duplicate data and update the information that needs to be updated.
Review Opportunities
An organized CRM means more ease in finding new opportunities – both in terms of leads and in terms of new partnerships.
Leads
Get in touch with prospects with whom you have not engaged for a long time. Find out how they are, what their current needs post-lockdown are, what events might trigger their interest and so on. You can assign leads to different teams after you have tagged all the leads as active and inactive.
Partnerships
Getting your CRM organized can also help you to find new business opportunities within your partners ecosystem. For instance, if you have a mobile app offering and your leads database has marketing agencies and software vendors, you can explore opportunities for integrations, sponsorships, joint-webinars, co-branding and much more. You can reach out to them and look for partnerships to deliver more holistic solutions to clients.
Train the Sales Team
While you are cleaning and organizing your CRM, schedule training sessions for those who are still not adept with its functioning or are new joiners. Tell them about the impotence of prompt follow-ups and about maintaining an organized CRM.
Concluding
Having a huge contact database will not get you the right ROI and help you to grow your business. You need to make the best use of your leads and your CRM’s capability. So, start organizing and decluttering your CRM. Have a smashing start to 2021!