CRM implementation: 5 key questions to ask your staff to help you customise reports

Even starting this article, I see a distinct theme coming through all of my suggestions concerning CRM.

Definition.

Without understanding your desired outcome, no technology will ever deliver the information you need to run your business.

Once you have your sales process defined, then you need to find out what information you want to report on. This might be pipeline or performance, by customer, by sales team, by sales staff, by vertical, by item or by service. It could be any number of things.

The key is to define the custom reports that are the most important for your business.

Reports should do 2 things:

1. Help you manage the business and performance
2. Help the sales staff to do what they do best – SELL!

Keep in mind that different people have different styles of selling and reports need to reflect this.

5 key questions to ask your sales staff:

1. How do they approach the sales process and moving opportunities through the pipeline?
2. What information would they like to be able to see about an opportunity all in one place?
3. Do they use spreadsheets (or any other means) off line to sort the data? If so why? How can that data be sorted and extracted from your CRM?
4. What information about the opportunity and prospect is relevant at which stages of your sales process? Does it change?
5. Ultimately what reports would make selling easier for you?

This will help define and inform your report customisations and also give significant insights into what data inputs are required to profile your opportunities.

As I’ve said in previous articles, without the correct data inputs, the reports become irrelevant and useless at best and misleading at worst.

But knowing what you want to measure and then report, is the first step to guiding the data input.

CRM Brisbane: for advice on business processes & CRM implementation call Bluewire Media on 1300 258 394.

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