Too Much Time on Internal Meetings

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 CRM 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

Without holding endless status meetings, how can sales, marketing and service teams work together? How do employees stay in front of customers? How do they know the next steps to further each sale or close each service ticket?

By helping them fix their CRM - Sales system now…AND the underlying business processes.

If your client has limped along for years with a half-implemented CRM system, now is the time to fix it.

When employees are all working from home without a working CRM system they:

• May not have current customer contact information
• Work inefficiently, calling on the same customers or customers with a history of service or payment problems
• Aren’t clear about what the next steps of the sales process are, and who is responsible
• Have to spend more time making phone calls and sending emails to get clarification

A well-implemented CRM system enhances productivity and provides accountability by:

• Reminding team members of follow up tasks
• Helping sales teams collaborate on complex deals
• Pinpointing delivery problems
• Improving customer loyalty
• Delivering accurate sales forecasts
• Providing metrics about behaviors and results

In an office environment, companies can get lax about their CRM usage. Sales people often just walk down the hallway to find out if the marketing email has dropped. Sales managers can overhear phone conversations.

With disuse, CRM systems begin to have unreliable data which leads to inaccurate forecasts and inefficient processes. We don’t know how long we’ll all be sheltering in place, but we do know that investing in solid business systems will pay off when we finally come out of the current state.

After more than 30 years of working with CRM systems, I can tell you the one thing I’ve learned for sure:

There’s NEVER a perfect time to implement or fix your CRM system because there is no magic “tomorrow” where you’ll have both time and money. 

It doesn’t happen. Companies have to decide that they’re serious about servicing customers and growing their business – or they’re not.

So… let’s focus on RIGHT NOW. Ask your client - What are the reasons to invest in fixing a CRM system? 

1. If you did the actual math to add up all those lost and unproductive hours spent emailing, meeting and clarifying details, you’d realize fixing a system you’ve already purchased is a complete no-brainer decision.
2. One of the MAJOR challenges of CRM implementations is that it’s difficult to get your experts pulled away from their regular job long enough to build out all the business rules. If your experts have time – and you want to keep them on payroll – getting them involved in a CRM project is a GREAT use of their time.
3. You’re building something ONCE to create long-term benefit. The systems you build today will pay off for years to come.
4. Now more than ever, you need to keep connected to customers and build loyalty! Today’s modern Dynamics CRM system uses AI-driven guidance to optimize buying decisions. 
5. Even without physically being there, sales management has the real-time pipeline and relationship analytics to better coach the sales and marketing team to improve performance.

The conversation is starting to change from > How Terrible Things Will Become to > How Specifically We Well Be Coming Out of This.  Are you ready? 

InfoGrow specializes in fixing Dynamics 365/CRM systems, and we’ve always done all our work remotely. Get on our calendar and let’s get your system fixed.

We’ll show you exactly what needs to be done to get your system back on track in terms of business process and technology.

Stay safe and healthy! If you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out.

bsullivan@infogrowcorp.com or call me at 330.929.1353 x 5224.
-- Bob