We've been blogging like crazy about CRM. Everything from prepping your data to exporting reports for your teams.
Anyone can write about CRM. But what's going on in real life? Is anyone really cleaning and segmenting their data, loading it into a CRM and creating useful reports to inform their business decisions? Turns out - yes!
We spoke with T.J. Pancake of SupportEXP, a company specializing in performance optimization consulting and training for financial institutions. They use a cloud-based CRM called LeadMaster and have become quite adept at reporting. We asked T.J. which reports he uses the most. "We use the Opportunity Forecasts the most. I use the standard Opportunity Forecast and Revenue Forecast reports often, as those help us to see what’s coming through the pipeline."
So what does this actually mean for T.J.'s business? It means he has the ability to "see gaps in the sales/marketing process and where we will need more operations employees to handle incoming clients." T.J continues, "As we see new clients coming on, we can prepare. In addition, we can track the revenue being generated throughout the year, or break it down quarterly to see where we are obtaining most of our revenue."
T.J. and SupportEXP also use the Lead Source report. "The lead source report shows us where we've met clients in the past, which helps plan where to focus our time and money in the future for the best return."
T.J. also uses the Callback/Activity report. This allows him to "make sure we are following up on all activities we’ve created." T.J. also states, "Activity reports are extremely beneficial in keeping us abreast of current activities and when we need to pick up the slack in a certain calling campaign."
So T.J. uses these three reports, among others, to inform his business decisions. But do the reports bridge the gaps seen so often between sales and marketing, or sales and operations? Yes, says T.J.!
I do see reports bridging both of these gaps. From the marketing-sales side, I have seen reports help us target the markets that are going to be the most efficient for us to locate our time, and to see how our previous marketing has done – we are working on a report now to see how Marketing Activities have fared. I see potential on the marketing side that we haven’t tapped into yet. In addition, I see this bridging the operations-sales gap as it helps us to look to the future to see what operations we will need, as well as keeping track of calls to clients.
Well said, T.J.
As you've probably figured out, T.J. is an advanced CRM user who creates his own custom reports as well as using his system's canned offerings. But, as always, he started simple - with clean, segmented data and simple reports. You, too, can make this happen in your company!
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