Remember the days when you were sent home from school with a report card? On this small “scorecard” was the teacher’s opinion of your schoolwork. Combined with the teacher’s opinion were cold, hard statistical facts about how you were making progress.
If you don’t get report cards any more, you are failing to learn how to improve your business.
CRM Report Card
The report card for your business has been set up in your CRM software and it scores your business strategy efforts every day. It’s called a dashboard.
Hopefully your CRM dashboard doesn’t give you the queasy stomach similar to the way you felt when you came home from school with less than an excellent report card. This report card supplies the information you want and alerts you to what you need to improve your company processes and marketing initiatives. Even when it is “bad” (less than stellar results) it gives valuable insight into what needs improvement and even clues about what to do about the deficiencies.
Goal-driven metrics are highly valuable. Metrics without a direct connection to goal objectives can be a waste. If you focus on Activity A and Activity B is what drives company sales growth, you are losing both time and focus. Clearly define the outcomes you want to achieve. Break down the steps to get there and measure each step.
Real Time Reporting
Instead of waiting until the next report card is issued, your CRM dashboard can give you up-to-the-minute analysis across the full spectrum of your company. You are able to identify issues, opportunities and trends. From this critical data, you can drill down to the underlying factors affecting improvement.
- Summaries: Metrics that offer an overview of the progress with the overall goals you have set for the company.
- Individual transactions: Measure the movement of sales leads through the sales process one-at-a-time or as a segment of your list.
- Mobile access: Allows team members to dig into the metrics from the field with real time, single source information.
- Sharable: Dependable key business indicators that all members can share with clients, fellow team members and prospects.
- Collaboration tool: When everyone trusts the numbers, it makes strategic planning and collaboration lead to better decisions.
User Adoption
If your company is new to using CRM dashboards, the first thing you may want to measure is whether team members are using the system. By far, the most important factor to making your data valuable is effective user adoption.
You can track the progress of individuals and teams within the company to identify those who may need additional support or encouragement. Rather than letting disregard for the metrics build up over time, you can respond immediately.
Whether you are setting up your first CRM dashboard or constantly adding new dashboard metrics to your business process, let’s hope you are getting an A+ on yourreport card.