Time and time again, firms voice the desire to deploy CRM to attain a more unified and 360-degree view of their clients and prospects, to collaborate and deliver more consistent service levels, and ultimately improve financial and business performance. Without real-time access to centralized, holistic, and accurate customer data in a leading CRM platform, such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM, industry laggards have little chance of ascending the ranks and transforming themselves into an upper echelon firm. The true value of CRM does extend beyond comprehensive data capture and accessibility, though. While not as often cited, CRM’s ability to track and report on employee performance is a huge benefit and strategic driver for leveraging CRM data.
The performance charting and goal tracking functionality of Microsoft Dynamics CRM allows you to immediately draw insights on firm, division, office, department, and individual employee performance. Views and charts can be quickly created, sorted, and expanded to see who is under performing and who is ahead of the pack. For instance, call center groups can immediately see which agent consistently answers more inbound calls along with who has the fastest resolution time.
Additionally, Sales Management can run their sales pipeline review meetings directly from CRM and see how the team and each Sales Rep are doing in relation to revenue and prospecting goal progress attainment. Moreover, sales results data can be further analyzed to identify common themes amongst closed business to uncover possible forthcoming drop-offs in demand or areas for improvement. For instance, one Sales Rep may have led the team in overall sales revenue for the first quarter of the year, but that may be a little misleading. By further examining his closed deals in CRM, the Sales Manager may actually realize that the initial success may not be sustainable as many of the won opportunities resulted from windfalls, slam-dunk referrals, or poaching as opposed to hard-earned prospecting and closing techniques.
In other cases, a proven Sales Rep may consistently be at the top of the leaderboard, but his repeat business and add-on sales are non-existent, according to CRM. While this is certainly a cause for concern, it is also a great coaching opportunity for the Sales Manager. Additional scrutiny of won deals may show that a certain Sales Rep only has success selling one particular product, and thus may need to improve his presentation skills on larger dollar ticket items that are more profitable to the firm. Furthermore, CRM’s collected data may demonstrate that a few Sales Reps tend to resort to discounts far too often in order to close business. Lastly, a Sales Rep may think he is doing a good job of cultivating relationships with external referral sources. After looking at his historical results, though, the Sales Executive may realize that the referrals he receives rarely pan out, and thus, he should find a better lead source.
The aforementioned performance tracking features available in CRM provide visibility needed by Executive leaders, Sales Managers, and front-line staff. Often times, firms just take for granted why certain outcomes occur based on prior results or opinions expressed by veteran employees. CRM’s stored data records take guessing and speculating out of the equation. The data serves as a valuable tool to provide actual proof, support, and an explanation for firm and employee performance. The great thing is that organizations save significant time in that they no longer have to wait on the IT reporting specialist to build a custom report to give them answers to their questions. With real-time data available at their fingertips, management personnel can utilize CRM to identify top performers, reward them for their outstanding work, and uncover actual data to serve as business case justification for why under-performers should buy into and adhere to the firm and department’s specific recommended behaviors.
As the three-time defending Microsoft Dynamics CRM East Region Partner of the Year, Customer Effective has helped many growing organizations that unfortunately had been previously paralyzed by their prior antiquated, clunky, and unusable CRM systems. Over the past decade, we have assembled a pool of best practices designed to optimize Microsoft Dynamics CRM deployments for larger enterprises and specific industry verticals. To learn more about how we can help improve your firm and employee performance and better serve your more demanding client base, please contact us.
Identify Opportunities for Staff Performance Improvement with Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a post from: CRM Software Blog