Dear Jake,

Deploying and using CRM is a moving through a maturity process. The first step is understanding that you need a phased plan – a roadmap. Your plan must have measurable milestones. With everyone in the organization having the ability to visualize the key KPIs en route, and make adjustments in the roadmap as needed.

Dear Barb - 
​
One of the challenges that we often see from a CEO is really trying to drive account managers to do prospecting and to reach out and follow up on leads.

​A CRM system provides vision into what is happening, or not happening with leads provided to the account manager as well as vision of the sales VP and CEO.  

Dear James, 
 
Sellers do have limited time, and in deciding how to focus many rely on guesswork or intuition. That leads to sub-par decisions and incomplete actions when interacting with customers or following a sales process. Here are 4 steps you can start taking today to help them improve their outcomes. 
 
1. Cut anything that is not sales related.
When organizations assign or let account managers perform customer service tasks or get involved with marketing, they are providing a manager with the number one excuse for not selling.  

Bob,
 
I have a client who is a CFO and she is concerned that her sales team is rapidly becoming Zoom-Zombies on time-consuming internal web meetings. Isn’t there a way could help them see that they could be using our Dynamics 365CRM to help their team work better from home?
 
Jack
 
Dear Jack,
Meetings aren’t all bad – and can be a great way to stay socially connected. However, we know that in general internal meetings are:

• Expensive (Employees aren’t selling or billing) AND
• Inefficient (Good weather today? Can you hear me? Sorry, bad connection

As reported in DestinationCRM.com, the most recent “CMO” Spend study by Gartner showed marketing budgets falling from a high of 12.1% of company revenue in 2016 to 11.3% in 2017. While cuts have varied across industries, retail and manufacturing were the hardest hit. While retail is going through some major changes, the study suggests that “manufacturing is adapting to emerging yet complex B2B2C opportunities”.

Accurate sales forecasting is essential to growing revenue and managing your business effectively. When you know the timing and amount of incoming revenue, you can plan and focus on the right business initiatives; budget and allocate resources appropriately; set organizational goals; and provide teams with priorities and guidelines for how they spend their time.