What makes a good CRM?

Insight into the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to Customer Relationship Managers.

“If it’s not in the system, it didn’t happen…” How many times have you heard this phrase, or one like it coming from your managers, or even your own mouths?

When using a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) not only do you want to have a complete view of your pipeline, but so does your manager. They want to know exactly what is going on with every opportunity, and as sales people, we tend to either forget, or often disregard adding useful information into them to keep our managers in the know.

In my previous role, we were required to make 20 customer contacts per day, either in person, or via phone call / email. Not only that, but we were expected to have 2 weeks planned out on our calendar at all times. Now time and time again, members of my team would fail to do this, mainly because about 60-75% of our engagements were through email with customers. The problem was of course, that there was no direct integration for our email system, and the CRM we were using. There was a back end desktop application that could select an email in our inbox and attach it to an account or opportunity, but it was so complicated and troublesome that the team never used it. Most of the time (if ever) the easiest solution was to just copy and paste the email into a note in the CRM, and even then it almost never happened.

At this point, our manager was being left in the dark. Pipelines filled with opportunities, and he has no insight into what stage they are in, what kind of work is being done, heck, or even if the customer was experiencing issues with us and was talking to Customer service about them. He was having to go into meetings with his boss blind, with no relevant information to explain our pipelines, and his projections for the quarter.

Needless to say, there were many painful conversations to express his displeasure in our day to day operations.

Now I will add that this was no run of the mill CRM, it was one of the leading CRMs on the market. Pretty expensive, and robust to boot. It had reporting functions, and analytics, I didn’t know how to use them, but they were there. Was it a good CRM? I’d say it was at the time, because I didn’t know any better, but looking back was it the best fit for my organization at the time? Absolutely Not.

If you are using a CRM for sales, both you and your manager need full visibility over not only your current customers, but also prospects. As the saying goes “Knowledge is power” and not being able to properly show what you know about an opportunity can only hurt you in the long run.

At this point I’ve provided a challenge, how about I provide you with the solution? Meet Zendesk Sell, a CRM that goes above and beyond any before it. The power behind this CRM is its easy integration with the basic tools most companies use. Need to integrate email, done. How about account information, done. Analytics? Done. Not only that, but you can attach Voice Credits and Text Credits to be able to talk and text straight from your browser. Best part of all? Every customer interaction can be done from the browser, and is automatically recorded.

The days of badgering your sales team to keep the CRM up to date is in the past. With Zendesk Sell, every thing your people do will be on file, making your job, and your manager’s job that much easier.

Let’s all make a vow to not leave our teams in the dark, take a look at Zendesk Sell today.

Want to hear more about it? Contact Us today to request a time to talk about it and your very own demonstration!