How can you get more out of your CRM? It’s a question a lot of managers have. Leading CRM systems like Salesforce have the power to transform your business, but they often come with a hefty price tag. How can you make sure you’re getting the full value out of your CRM? In this post, we’re looking at four ways you can make your team more productive when using a CRM.
You can improve your ROI on your CRM by:
- Increasing utilization
- Onboarding new users
- Fixing bad data and
- Automating mundane tasks
Increase Utilization
The first step in getting more out of your CRM is to make sure people actually use it. While that seems overly simple, if you work in sales enablement, you know getting teams to utilize a CRM is quite tricky.
Employees often view CRM systems as unnecessarily complicated and view updating records as burdensome. To improve your CRM utilization, you have to make the CRM easier to use.
Digital Adoption Solutions, like Apty, are an excellent solution for increasing utilization. A recent Gartner report highlighted Digital Adoption Solutions as a critical factor for companies to consider if they want to improve their sales productivity.
Apty Assist includes guided workflows that make even the most complicated tasks a self-guided wizard. Instead of struggling to remember what to click and how to update a record, the workflow guides users through each step.
If you make your CRM easier to use, more people will use it.
Onboard New Users
Another tip for increasing your productivity and overall utilization is to properly onboard new users. A good onboarding program can increase an employee’s productivity by up to 70 percent.
Employees who are appropriately onboarded are more confident in their role, responsibilities, and ability to use your software.
Apty Assist now includes onboarding checklist you can utilize to guide new employees through how to use your enterprise software.
Fix Bad Data
To get the full value of a CRM like Salesforce, you need to leverage the platform’s data capabilities. However, as anyone who has had the joy of pulling a report out of a CRM, you know that data quality is often lacking.
Sales managers frequently list data quality as one of their top problems. In a recent survey, nearly 60 percent of Salesforce users reported that they thought 80 percent or more of their data was unreliable or unuseful.
Let that sink in for a minute. For all the money you spend on training and all the time you spend trying to make sure people update your CRM, most people think they can’t trust the data that comes out of it.
Good data gives you the power to make better decisions about your business and can be used to improve your sales process and identify new opportunities. At Apty, we help our customers solve data quality issues by making sure bad data never makes it into the system.
Apty Assist’s validations alert users on their screen inside the CRM when an error is detected. Each validation can be configured to conform to your business rules. You can even have the system stop the user from moving on until they fix the mistake.
Automate Mundane Tasks
The final tip for improving your productivity is to leverage automation. We’re expanding our toolset and adding automation features that will enable you to leverage robotic process automation in any application, but if you want to increase your productivity today start small.
What mundane tasks can you automate today? What about pulling reports? Do you have a report that needs to be reviewed each week? Set it up to automatically email out each week. It seems like a small step, but it could have a significant impact on your productivity.
Most people make the mistake of thinking it’s not that big of a deal to pull a report. But the person who pulls it has to take up mental space and energy to remember to do it. Then they have to stop what they’re doing. Go through all the steps and finally email it to everyone that needs it. You could save a lot of time by allowing the system to do it.
Notification alerts for sales rep are another automation feature included in most CRMs. Leverage this feature to give your sales team a nudge to take action on an opportunity. Explore your CRM’s documentation for additional ideas for what type of automation is possible.
Apty’s chatbot lets your Sales Team update your CRM without even logging into the system. See how Apty can help you with automation in this video.
If you’d like to learn more about how Apty could help increase your CRM productivity, schedule a demo today. One of our utilization experts will discuss your needs and show you where Apty could make a difference.
