Most companies have some kind of CRM to track their sales activities. They are all over the board in terms of how they are used, what information they collect, and how all of that information is collected. Cleaner, more complete, and more relevant data is the goal of every CRM administrator, but this is often more of an aspiration than reality.
Garbage in, garbage out
Good data is limited to the people and systems that are entering information. The CRM administrator must walk a fine line in guiding salespeople to enter information that will be helpful while not making requirements so strict that team members simply revolt and stop making entries into the CRM altogether. The challenge is finding a middle way that makes for good data and happy, active users.
Some data just isn’t helpful.
Just because data is complete it doesn’t necessarily mean that it has value for your sales efforts. We find that a lot of the data that companies collect just doesn’t have any significant relationship with desired outcomes, and larger sales teams can spend hours entering and maintaining this data. Knowing what information is related to closing deals would save your team time and effort, and ultimately help them close more deals.
Who do you call?
With limited resources and nearly unlimited potential opportunities it can be difficult to know who to call and when. It’s common for salespeople to make calls simply to maintain the relationship simply because they don’t know what products they might sell a particular customer. While maintaining good customer relationships is important, more of these calls could be made with the needs of the customer in mind.
What all of these problems have in common, good data or bad, is they are examples of sales teams with incomplete information. A salesperson could have access to all of the information they can handle and more, but what they really want is concrete information about who to call, what to offer, and why that product, and that prospect, are a good fit.
Salespeople don’t want more data, they want to sell more. Fixing a CRM with messy, incomplete, and generally unhelpful data means not just fixing the data or adding more data, but fundamentally changing what the CRM does for sales. The addition of prescriptive analytics turns the traditional CRM into a prescriptive playbook, guiding sales to more revenues and more deals in every step of the funnel.
Here’s how:
Supplement your CRM with other sources. Emcien augments your CRM with analysis of your orders for targeted recommendations, cross-sell and upsell.
Clean out the worthless data. Predictive analysis can tell you what data indicates a successful sale, and get rid of everything that doesn’t.
Give your sales reps specific, actionable guidance, not charts and graphs. Salespeople only want to know what will help them sell more. Emcien predictive sales solution gives them exactly that.