Marketing Rant: Learn How to Use Your CRM!

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A CRM–even the best CRM–doesn’t do much good if you don’t know how to use it.

What I’ve learned recently is that there is likely a very small group of people in any organization that actually knows how to use the CRM correctly. Two recent experiences confirm this is the case within our organization (and my guess is that your company is no different):

1) Prospect Source – Every new account that signs up with LogMyCalls needs to have a Prospect Source field that is completed. In other words, we want to know how the account found us. That’s sort of, you know, important information for marketing to have.

Most of the time that information is passed via the CRM prospect record into the account, but sometimes the information needs to be entered manually.

Recently I noticed that some accounts were coming through without Prospect Source information. When I talked to the sales team about this, I suddenly realized that the reason they hadn’t been entering Prospect Source was because they didn’t know how to enter Prospect Source.

I assumed they knew how to do this. They didn’t.

No one had ever told our sales team–particularly the newest members of that team–how to input Prospect Source information.

Note: You can push call detail records from LogMyCalls into your CRM to alleviate, at least, the phone side of things. We are. And it works.

2) Reports – Recently someone on our sales team asked me to create a Google Doc that listed out each of our lead sources for the first 2 quarters of 2013, including total leads from each source, campaigns, accounts from each source etc.

I was baffled/flaggergasted/shocked/irritated.

Why?

Because all of that data–every bit of it–is easily accessible within our CRM. They just didn’t know how to get at it.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself about your usage of your CRM:

– Do I know how to create useful reports within my CRM?

– Do I know how to update and edit any piece of information within my CRM?

– Are there things within the CRM of which I am utterly ignorant?

– Do other people in my company know how to do everything I know how to do?

I just assumed that sales knew how to do everything in the CRM that I knew how to do. This was a stupid assumption because they have never been trained.

Use Your CRM

Creating a document that had lead sources external to the CRM is not a good idea. But when the sales team doesn’t know how to use the CRM, it seems like a good idea.

The key is this: know how to use your tools.

Republished with author's permission from original post.

McKay Allen
LogMyCalls is the next generation of call tracking and marketing automation. The award winning product from ContactPoint, LogMyCalls provides lead scoring, conversion rate tracking and close rate mapping. For more information visit LogMyCalls.com and call (866) 811-8880.

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