When you are new to using a CRM platform (such as Zoho, Keap, Hubspot, or Salesforce), the idea seems simple enough - get all of this information from my spreadsheet of contacts into one place.  Then you begin learning about all of the exciting features, such as email templates, workflows, and integrations with other applications that you use. Shiny object syndrome may hit. We've all been victims to it before, so you're not alone. 

If you focus on the exciting features too much and neglect proper setup of the basics, then your powerful CRM platform becomes... well, a mess. Usage slowly shifts into the category of "tools I should use, but generally avoid." This is especially true for sales teams. Give them the wrong things to focus on, and they are not likely to use your CRM.

If your team hits this point, then it's time to step back and evaluate. Either assign someone in the company to take on this task or hire a third-party CRM consulting firm.  As the primary user or admin, it can be difficult to objectively evaluate your CRM. 

1. Goals: What do you need from your CRM? 

Write a list of your goals for the information that is needed from your CRM. A few examples may include: identifying hottest leads quickly, reports on open deals, activity tracking for customer retention, and tracking referrals. 

2. Customer Data and Details: What do you know about your customers?

One of the key features of a CRM software is the fact that it is more than a robust spreadsheet. This is a fully-featured database system. [More about Database Basics]

When you initially set up your CRM, did you take into account all of the important information you want to have reports on? These are likely to be custom fields, such as birthday, industry, buying behaviors, location details, and the health of the working relationship.

Entering this information into notes means you cannot necessarily pull reports on it, which reduces the quality of your database. When you want to better understand patterns in your customers, reports will help you to better define customer personas. 

3. Customer Journey: What are the most common steps for leads / prospects to take?

Your CRM strategy depends on what you need your CRM to provide the business. It also depends on how your business attains customers. 

Once you understand how to find and sell to customers, then you’ll naturally know what you need from a CRM strategy and software. Here are a few questions to help you:

• How do people discover your business?
• When are they ready to buy? And how do you know it?
• What does it take to close deals and sell?

4. Process: Have you documented or diagrammed your workflow processes?

Beyond goals and customer information, one of the most crucial components of a successful CRM setup is understanding your workflow processes. Sketch out your workflows related to the CRM by starting with your top priorities in each workflow. 

You must be able to communicate these essential processes to your team members who use the CRM. Consistent use of your CRM is vital to your success. Something great that can come from this step of evaluation are new ideas for your content marketing and customer nurturing. 

When we evaluate your CRM, we are looking for bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and redundancies in your CRM strategy and platform usage. We identify the places where processes can be streamlined. Are there holes in your workflow? Are things falling between the cracks or not being addressed? Perhaps one workflow is overwriting another one.

The second part is to consider how you can make the CRM user-friend to different team members based on their role. 

5 CRM User Best Practices for success

1. Permissions Impact Your Data Security

 It may not be the most exciting thing to consider, but the proper setup of user roles and permissions is vital to security and business success. Even in a business with a small team, consider limiting the access to different modules or actions within your CRM for certain users. It will simplify their user experience so they are not distracted by things that do not pertain to their role.  Put the right responsibility into the right hands https://www.zoho.com/crm/role-based-security.html  

2. User Adoption and Processes 

 As the leader in your organization, you must model the CRM adoption and enforce among team members that it is required to get the job done.  Getting buy-in from the entire team is vital for the successful use of a CRM or any other business software. As a leader, you have the responsibility of cultivating good habits with your team of users.

The fastest way to make a mess of your CRM data is with inconsistent and incorrect processes. Use the document with your processes and workflows (or create one if you haven't already). It is easy to overwhelm the team by asking them to change everything all at once, so the best way to approach this is by rolling out one to two processes at a time. Start with your top priorities. Perhaps this is simply the updated procedure of making phone calls through the CRM for automatic tracking or adding new opportunities into the CRM instead of the old spreadsheet.

3. Automate the Mundane

According to Hubspot's 2024 State of Sales Report, only 39% of a sales rep’s time is spent selling or interacting with prospects and customers. The rest of their time is spent on administrative tasks or research. 

Working with your sales person(s), identify the most mundane and tedious tasks that are repeated the same exact way every time (i.e. Create a follow-up task when I log a voicemail). If it does not require human decision-making, then you can automate it. 

You will minimize costs, increase productivity, and improve data quality when you properly use workflow automations.  Automations enables your team to spend more time on the important tasks, and it can improve prospect & customer engagement.

One common automation to use is to label leads who do not wish to receive emails. You can automatically update those leads to remove wasted time by sending emails to unverified recipients who are not qualified.  This also avoids the negative result of potentially being reported as “Spam,” which damages email deliverability and open rates. 

4. CRM Reporting and Using Your Data

Among the greatest benefits we get from a CRM is data collection and reporting. Why? Because there is so much we can learn about our customers, leads, and even our operations from reporting. 

Before getting excited about reports, there is important preliminary work to do. First, identify your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). What do you want to measure, why, and how often?  One common sales KPI may be number of leads contacted each week. A common marketing KPI may be about email click rates per campaign. These are important benchmarks that serve the larger business goals of generating revenue for growth. 

Using your KPIs, prepare reports ahead of time for your team to use and reference on a regular basis – add them to the CRM homepage. You may want to email KPI reports every Friday with the latest statistics so the team knows where they stand before the weekend. More important than getting the reports is using the data. Have a plan or strategy for how that data is applied to daily business practices and decision-making. 

5. Gamification

If you can make work more fun, then why not? A great way to lift a team’s competitive spirit is by gamifying your systems, especially your CRM software.  This can include offering prizes to your team for best user adoption or increased sales opportunities.  On the simpler side, many systems, such as Zoho CRM, include digital gamification through online badges.

This is a successful approach to reinforce any CRM training previously done. Delivering positive reinforcement like rewards or prizes can increase motivation and engagement among team members. 

BONUS: Continual Training

     While everyone has different motivators, professional development is a highly reported benefit that companies can offer – recurring training. In the case of Zoho CRM, this may be an annual training to refresh knowledge, highlight new features, and ask for new ideas about what will make their working day smoother. 

If your company is conducting CRM training, then be sure that all training reflects your agreed-upon processes. Thinking back to the best practices of User Adoption in this list, consistency is vital for success. Software is one of those things that requires continual training and learning with the team. Each time you host a CRM training, it creates a new opportunity for feedback, improvements in process, and learning from each other. 

CRM implementation requires, above everything else, a strong plan and following user best practices. You might face challenges such as data integrity, automation decisions, manual data entry, user adoption, and more. Following CRM user best practices can significantly improve the usefulness of your CRM system. 

If you already understand the value of customer relationship management, then creating a strategy and plan for how your company will use a CRM system is the logical next step. Define your CRM strategy framework. 

The excitement of using new technology and the idea of automating processes is very appealing, but remember that the planning work needs to be handled before implementation. If you start customizing, importing contacts, and setting up automations / workflows without a guide map, then you will likely end up doing double work. 

This article discusses the importance of your marketing strategy first, then goes through the 7 steps you can take to create your CRM Strategy Framework. 

Quality Sales and Marketing Are About Offering Value

How do your CRM and marketing strategy connect? 

Begin with the overall sales and marketing funnel. Your marketing efforts are expected to feed leads into the top of the funnel. How do those leads get into your CRM? And how are they managed once added there? 

What Is Your Marketing Strategy? 

Clients often ask us how to write content, such as social media posts that will connect with their customers or emails that will get high click rates. The first thing we say is to be sure you have a strong offer based on providing the prospect value. 

Provide value through your marketing content and you'll see better results – people filling out opt-in forms, making a purchase, inbound email inquiries, etc. This all begins with a documented content marketing strategy.

Within your marketing strategy should be your knowledge about the business' ideal customers.  This may be a Customer Persona or at least a simple profile. To connect with customers, you must begin by listening to what they say, watching what they are doing, and asking smart questions about their pain points and ideal solution. 

If you are developing a marketing funnel or still in a place of understanding your customers, then you'll check out Lead Generation and Funnel Basics. 

Once you know how to drive traffic to your opt-in forms and purchase pages, then it is time to work on what happens afterwards. This is the framework for a CRM strategy that encompasses both sales and marketing.

These seven steps guide you through the process of properly defining your CRM Strategy and creating a plan. 

1. Audit

Our team usually starts the process by evaluating your current CRM setup (or the equivalent). Whether you're already using a basic CRM platform such as Hubspot or Monday, or maybe you're an existing Zoho CRM user, regular CRM audits are useful. This should go beyond a basic data audit, though that is important.

1. What do you like about your current system and flows?

2. What are your barriers to success?

3. What do you imagine would make it better?

The audit outcome includes reports about your CRM data, issues, and improvements. In addition, we make recommendations to help you keep the good things and expand upon them for a better system. 

Also consider if there are any third-party applications that your business depends on that should be connected with your CRM. If your current system is siloed because it is not possible to integrate different systems or you are relying on middleware such as Zapier, then you may want to move to a more integrated platform such as Zoho One. 

Despite the general high-tech education many expect of the world, databases are more complex than a spreadsheet. There is a misconception that everyone understands how a CRM database works. 

One of the leading issues in creating a strong CRM Strategy Framework is the administrator's understanding of how CRM databases work. Taking a little time to learn about databases, will make decisions so much easier and yield better long-term results. 

Watch Our Database Basics Series:

In the audit, we looked at the R of CRM: Relationships. What is your relationship like with customers right now?

Nurturing relationships takes work and strategic planning. Creating the right plan can reduce the mundane parts while still keeping in touch in a useful way. This is the stage when you begin to ask questions such as, 

• What information do we need to know to win the business? 
• What are the key touchdowns throughout the customer lifecycle?
• What do we know about customers to help us segment our communications?

4. CRM Customization 

The next step is to decide how you want everything laid out within your CRM software. What are the fields, where do they go, and how are they used? 

Most likely, you have a set of fields you used in a previous CRM or your spreadsheets that provide a solid starting place. However, this is also an opportunity to re-think those fields and whether you need them. 

Tied into all of this, of course, are questions about your current data and how you will prepare it for importing once the CRM customization is complete. You may also take into account the layout - thinking about the order fields are in on the record page and event the design, if that is important to your business. 

5. Automation 

What are your top 5 automations? Start with the tasks that are tedious and repeated exactly the same way every time. 

Document all of the automated workflows that will make your business run smoother immediately. Here are some ideas for emails you may want to automate. Be sure to include the details: what triggers the automation to start, what are the filtering criteria (i.e. only include Leads from Texas), and what actions happen and when (i.e. send an email). 

What are the big audacious ideas you would like to pursue?  After documenting all of the automations, we recommend prioritizing your list and potentially setting up automations in phases. You could have the priority 1 automations be part of your launch, then priority 2 happen 30 days later, priority 3 automations happen 60 days later, and so on for continually building improvements. 

6. Integrations

Are there any third-party applications that your business depends on that should be connected with your CRM? 

The common ones we look at are you email provider (i.e. Microsoft Outlook or Google), bookkeeping (i.e. Quickbooks), and Project Management (i.e. Jira or Asana). At this stage, consider which integrations your business requires, what information needs to be available in the CRM, and how often you want that information updated. 

Zoho's marketplace has many free and paid extensions that allow users to connect with third party applications. Carefully review your options before deciding which one(s) are right for your business. 

7. Launch Plan

What is the order of operations for implementation in your organization? 

Perhaps you'll do the complete CRM customization first and import your historical data. Then you will train key sales team members. Once they are using the CRM for a couple of weeks, then you add the top 5 automations to improve their workflow. 

However you choose to go about this step in your CRM strategy framework, be sure to consider the onboarding plan of the key sales and marketing team members (training). We recommend training the leadership team or managers first, then adding the rest of the team. Often, people learn as they go and will have questions that, ideally, a supervisor or team leader can answer. 

Over the 15 or so years, our team has used many different CRM platforms - Hubspot, Salesforce, Insightly, SugarCRM, Pipedrive, and many others. Through the process of experiencing different features and user experiences, we have learned to begin any software conversation with definitions - especially if you have never used one before.  

If you are seeking a partner to support you through this process, then we invite you to meet with us and see if we are a fit for your business. 

Originally published Aug 19, 2019

What is a CRM Strategy?

While the term CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is often used by sales teams to describe contact management for leads, there is more to your CRM than a bloated spreadsheet or software.  Among high-tech marketers, CRM usually refers to the software or systems used to manage your business relationships. Without a strategy, a CRM software is just another tool.

Achieve Goals

Most of us serving other businesses have a common goal: to grow long-term relationships with customers and prospects that ultimately increase revenue and lifetime value. If you have this goal, then you need a CRM strategy. 

There are many different ways people define a CRM strategy. To define your own, start by considering the many ways things you do for business development, sales, and on-going management of client relationships. When done well, your CRM strategy will define how you can optimize your time spent on managing relationships and maximize your sales. 

If you are using a CRM software, the strategy will intertwine with how you leverage the different features to achieve this strategy.  In a separate article, we'll get into all of the logistics behind why a CRM software is vital to your business. Today, we are sharing 5 simple reasons that a customer relationship management strategy may be needed in your business.

#1 Know Your Customers / Target Audience 

When you are developing real relationships, there's no way to "fake" it. As your marketing consultant, I might ask you to close your eyes and imagine your customer. Can you describe this person? Do you know about what frustrates her most about her job or what his preferences are for business communication?  If you cannot answer those basic questions, then you probably do not actually know your customers. 

[For those of you thinking, my customers are businesses not people – it's time to start thinking about the people making decisions at those companies.]

One of the most powerful things I discovered after implementing a CRM strategy for my own business was that it is also a market research tool. Within Zoho CRM, for example, I can view reports that show patterns among customers and prospects – such as industries, company size, or location. The right data analytics can help you better understand your different target audiences and the segments within them.

Even if you're just using a spreadsheet right now, you can make reports on platforms such as Zoho Analytics to see patterns. Perhaps you are attracting more people from a specific niche market than you realized. Knowing this kind of information can have a major impact on your sales, marketing, and even operations.

#2 Build Better Customer Relationships 

People are demanding personalization more than ever.  According to the State of the Connected Customer Report, customers want businesses to understand their individual needs and expectations, however 66% of people often feel they are treated like numbers. 

Personalization is when a business uses data to tailor communications to specific needs and preferences. The moment a potential customer feels treated like another number, you have most likely lost them. 

The customer data you have collected already can help you to build stronger relationships and serve customers/clients better. That data allows you to ask smarter questions that relate to them, offer services or products based on their needs, or educate them about something they did not quite understand. You may be surprised at the impact of something trivial like a custom birthday email.

#3 Sharing Data Across Your Organization 

Data sharing is more about your CRM software system and business guidelines than your CRM strategy, though the two are intertwined.  A big issue for quickly growing companies that are scaling is the appropriate sharing of information.  

When you suddenly have three new salespeople to train and they know nothing about your top customers, it is a big challenge.  In comes your CRM system and your team onboarding program. If you have created a thorough CRM strategy and implemented a CRM software system, then it is much easier to onboard your new team members. 

Within your CRM strategy will not only be the sales and marketing "how to" steps, but it should also include data sharing rules. These rules define who sees what information (potentially how and why).  

For example, if you have a sales team spread out across the country where each person has a dedicated region for selling, then your strategy outlines what that region includes and how the prospect data is divided up.  In Zoho CRM, this function is called Territory Management. This feature allows you to segment customers and prospects into individual territories and assign a sales representative to each one. 

After defining your strategy and setting up your system to reflect it, guiding people through the correct ways to use the different features and fields will set them (and your business) up for success. Say goodbye to wasted hours and reduce the likelihood of major mistakes.

Both over-messaging and under-messaging customers are problems for any business. Many business owners and marketing directors have shared their fear of sending too many emails.

If there are too many emails, SMS messages, social messages, and phone calls to customers, then some customers may feel overwhelmed - creating marketing content fatigue. On the other hand, disappearing from the minds of your customers is also ineffective.

There is a delicate balance in the frequency of customer communications. If you are tracking your customer communications using a CRM system, this is less of a problem. Assuming you have everything integrated, you can see all of the communications received by an individual. With the right software, you can also see detailed email analytics (for example), to help you better understand which messages are most effective. 

#5 Analyze Your Customers as Revenue Generators

Yes, we treat all customers equally with high-quality service and products. It's important to know which ones are the most valuable to the company. That means tracking your sales or deals with all the specific details and matching them up to the right customers. You may be able to do this with your bookkeeping software to an extent.

Using a CRM will also allow you a few other ways to understand the value of your customers. This includes attribution to any marketing campaigns that led to the sale, lead scoring, referral contacts, and a level of detail that is usually not on an invoice (such as a breakdown of the project deliverables).

While developing a CRM Strategy is a fairly big undertaking, it is worth the time investment upfront. When you skip over this step, many issues arise over time such as bad data. If you want to get started on it right now, then download our free guide to developing your CRM Strategy. And if you want support or guidance through this process, then drop us a line by filling out the form below.