We have been talking about the importance of deploying a sales tool even when you’re at early stages with your business, to help you boost sales and learn how to manage your leads right from the start. Today we want to follow up on that and share a few tips with you on how CRM customization can best suit your business needs.
In sales, It’s all about managing the processes and your daily sales-supportive tool should do the same and quickly adapt to your sales process, in order to ensure a smooth and effective
workflow.
There is no point in wasting time, money and energy in a complex tool that doesn’t align with your internal sales structure and your business needs. When it comes to deciding what tool to use, customization should be the tie breaker in the decision making process. If you’re still unsure about which tool is the right for you, have a look at one of our previous posts, where we examine
different CRM types for different businesses.
There are 3 important customizations you can make inside your CRM tool, which will help you improve efficiency and ultimately, lead to successfully closing more deals.
Inside You Don’t Need a CRM, you can start by customizing your account and security settings and define exactly who can see what in your team, who can assign leads to who and also set one or more Admins for your Account.
1) Customize your default lead fields
Sales people tend to waste a lot of time on setting up company records and entering customer data even though they haven’t even qualified the prospect yet and have no guarantee that the contact has an interest in the product or service you’re selling and is of any value to the company. They need to do all this, because traditional CRM systems require a lot of information input before the sales rep can start working on their leads.
That’s exactly why we have created our unique prospecting feature inside our Lead Management Software, which allows you to work on an online spreadsheet like database with all your prospects (not yet qualified leads), go on about your cold calls, and once a contact shows interest in the product or service you’re selling, simply convert it into a lead in one simple click.
Inside You Don’t Need a CRM, we want you to be as efficient as possible and therefore ask you in the account set up phase to customize your lead fields, so that once you do create a Lead, you
only enter exactly the information that is relevant to your business and nothing more than that. When you’re doing so, make sure your default lead fields match with those you have defined in your prospecting list, so once you convert a prospect into a lead, all the correct lead fields will be displayed properly.
Your sales tool shouldn’t force you to fill out useless information which you then don’t even end up using. Try to keep it short, sweet and relevant to your business.
2) CRM Customization: your sales funnel
Your sales funnel should reflect your sales process and therewith also your business. It should be about you and how you manage your sales steps.
Sales processes vary a lot from company to company, even from product to product and always need to adapt to your own sales structure.
You should define your sales funnel based on your company’s needs and the way you work. If you’re selling software subscriptions for instance, you need a step for demoing the product and probably another follow up meeting before you send the proposal out.
It is important that you choose the names of your individual sales steps correctly. So if you have defined meeting as one sales step, maybe be more precise and group them into e.g Initial Meeting, Contract Meeting etc, so that you always know exactly at what action at what stage in the sales process you’re doing and avoid confusion amongst colleagues.
If we look at the case of a travel agency, they have a completely different process and sales people couldn’t work with the same sales steps as they would in the first example. Therefore, it is really important that your sales funnel corresponds with the way you work and leaves you the freedom of adapting it so it suits your needs.
3) Synch your calendar and Integrate with 3rd party apps relevant to your business
Synchronising your calendar and making sure to stay on top of your To-Do’s and meetings might sound like the least important of CRM customization you could do but it should not be underestimated. A simple synchronization can have a great impact on your business and the way you work. We all know the pain of forgetting to call back a customer or being late for a meeting because the time was mistaken in the calendar. Sure things like this happen but they don’t have to as it lets you and the business you represent look unorganized.
Therefore, making sure that you have your calendar (both on your desktop and your phone) synchronized with your lead Management software, will make your sales life a lot easier and take away the fear of forgetting important tasks.
Inside You Don’t Need a CRM!, you can easily synch your Google, Ical, Outlook, or whatever calendar you’re using with your Lead Management Software, ensuring you always get a notification about your To Do’s, Callbacks, Follow-ups, conferences and meetings. But this is not all you can do with integration inside your CRM system.
Having your account integrated with relevant 3rd party applications can be of great use to your business. Having all important tools in one place, not only saves time but also
allows you to focus on one thing without having to switch between different tools all the time. The choice of which 3rd party apps you want to integrate should be based on the needs of your business but there are some tools such as Accounting and Email Marketing tools which can help your business at any stage.
The best and easiest way is to go on Zapier.com and have a look at different SaaS integrations the Website offers. With hundreds of applications to choose from, you can easily create your own
“zaps” which are relevant to your business and define exactly what part of your
lead management service you want to connect.
Inside You Don’t Need a CRM, you can connect your account to popular Accounting Services like Freshbooks and Quickbooks as well as Dropbox to keep your data stored and many more and much more. If you need help figuring out the best connections to make your sales life easier, check out our blog post on this subject
In conclusion, whether you’re still searching for the sales tool with the right fit or have already found your CRM tool, always look out for the customization options and think about you and your business needs rather than just following some set sales procedures which are not relevant to your type of business at all.
We at You Don’t Need a CRM are always happy to answer any questions you might have or help out in the customization process.
If you want to know more about it or see yourself how you can adapt your sales tool, why don’t you try it out for free?
The You Don’t Need a CRM! Team
