How Do You Know When It’s Time to Reevaluate Your CRM Strategy?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a tricky beast. Since the early days of CRM, companies have viewed it as everything from a vital strategic tool to a “necessary evil” that they’re forced to use but don’t fully buy into.

Nevertheless, it’s become a foundational process for just about every business out there. Nearly 91% of businesses with 11+ employees use CRM technology in some capacity, a fact that has made CRM strategy a hot-button issue.

How does a company develop a CRM strategy? What steps are required to coordinate people, processes, and technologies to drive meaningful results? And what are the pitfalls you might encounter along the way?

The Poor State of Modern CRM

CRM systems have been around for years, but they weren’t designed for the modern business world. Conventional CRM is a relic of an older era, when sales reps interacted with customers in person and software platforms were kept mostly for record keeping and tracking.

Things look a little different today in our remote-first world. These days, businesses have vast, digitized sales funnels and much larger numbers of customer relationships to deal with. The CRM of the past had a hard time keeping up with these revolutions. Is it any wonder that nearly 50% of all CRM deployments either underperform or fail outright?

The reasons behind this are numerous and often include overpromising by CRM companies and a lack of cohesion during implementation of a CRM platform. One of the biggest culprits is data management.

It’s estimated that “dirty” data—a term that encompasses inaccurate, duplicate, or fraudulent data—costs U.S. businesses more than $3 trillion each year. For the average business, this translates to roughly a 12% loss in annual revenue. Yikes!

As a result, companies (who were once excited about the prospect of a CRM project) became wary of the technology and felt underwhelmed by their so-called digital transformation.

Although this story is far too common, the good news is that most companies won’t need to rip apart their CRM and start from scratch to see improvements. There are better (and far easier) ways to move the needle, provided you know the secrets behind successful CRM implementation and long-term process improvement.

Key Elements for Assessing Your CRM Strategy

Unless you’re one of the lucky few who is actively leveraging your CRM to its fullest, there’s a good chance your organization could benefit from a reevaluation of CRM strategy.

At Empellor CRM, we’ve developed a checklist to guide CRM optimization efforts.

1. Data Enhancement: Does your data support your business?
2. Data Reporting: Is your team still reliant on manual processes?
3. User Adoption: Is everyone in your organization doing things the same way?
4. CRM Utilization: Are your business processes integrated and supported by CRM?
5. Data Lifecycle Management: Are your data problems a symptom of poor processes?
6. Lead Nurturing: Is your lead nurturing program failing to live up to expectations?
7. Sales Cycle Management: Do you stop the sales process when the deal is won?
8. Deal Management: Are you tracking for lost deals?
9. CRM Enhancement: Does your CRM directly support your business goals and priorities?

What goes into each of these elements? Way too much to get into here.

Consider this Part One of our upcoming blog series on ways to identify CRM issues and deploy strategies for improvement. We’ll take a deep dive into each of these topics, we’ll outline some of the most pertinent questions to ask, and we’ll offer tips to shore up weaknesses. By the end, you’ll have a deeper understanding of CRM and how your company can reimagine its processes, not as a frustrating headache, but as a driver of change across all aspects of your sales and marketing.

Contact Empellor CRM today to learn how we can help you analyze your CRM setup and align it with your business needs.