Online collaboration

We will spare you the worn-out talking points, we all understand that COVID-19 has forever changed our familiar life and economy. Face masks, two feet distance and all of a sudden we became hand-sanitizer experts. But to stay successful in the market, the real expertise you want to acquire for remote working conditions is how to manage your business successfully.

While COVID-19 faces us with many challenges, technology has also progressed and offers creative ways to work from home and manage a team, clients and lots of data.

So, with social distance standing in our way, how do we maintain work collaboration, customers, leads and all of our information in this digital world?

We present to you, the CRM!

By no means is this new technology, most companies are using a CRM of some sort. And with a consumer-driven economy, all companies can benefit from this tool. From E-mail marketing, sales, business development, customer service, B2B, CRM is your company’s go-to for online productivity.

But what is it and how can we use it to our advantage?

CRM is the acronym for customer relationship management and just as its name suggests, it is a software that helps businesses to manage relationships with customers, team and information. It is the substitution of the physical space we used to hold and translated it to the virtual world for the organization’s workflow.

With remote-working and new business models, having a successful system to operate within is essential to your success. However, most sales reps are not using it to its full capacity. 87% of sales reps admitted they only use the CRM because their company requires them to and 78% said they only “check the boxes.” This means a lot of important activities and information are being left out of the CRM and kept in the sales rep’s records. Which of course will have dire consequences for the business. When this much information is being left out of your main database it is a given that business will fall through the cracks and relationships will fall off. Amid a recession triggered by COVID-19, we must adopt new digital techniques to keep our business in the game.

In this article, we want to show you how you can leverage your CRM to make remote work more efficient for you and your team. Your team must understand that CRM is not just a tool for management to police what everyone is doing. Instead, it is a sales enablement and communication tool that can be used from anywhere. If it isn’t already, this should be your business’ new home base. So be sure to get your sales team on board with using the CRM.

Enter all relevant data and activity into your CRM.

This is the most crucial step a sales rep could take to improve the business while working from home. Your CRM is a secure and centralized database. Having all your data in one place has an array of benefits.

Keeping detailed records means that anyone on the sales team can quickly pull up a customer’s history and offer top-notch customer service because they already know what preferences they might have or challenges they might be facing. All of a sudden extra data comes into play! Our computers can hold more information than our brain and with an organized CRM you can pull that bit of information at the right time, the right place and SEAL THE DEAL!

And for the future, having heaps of relevant data is valuable. Data can be analyzed and leveraged in many ways to make a customer’s experience more personalized, improve customer service and increase revenue.

So all in all, with data being romanticized in the modern world, a bit of extra data can never hurt anybody…

Integrate all workflow applications into your CRM.

Integrate emails, calendars or any other workflow applications your team might be using. Keeping all your information on one platform reduces confusion and ensures that tasks or meetings don’t fall through the cracks (which can happen with distractions around the house).

It is the easiest way to communicate, create a smooth operating system across multiple channels and automate any task that doesn’t need direct human interaction.

All in all, it saves you a lot of time, energy and consequently, money.

Clean up your CRM data and automate where you can.

We cannot emphasize this enough. Seriously, a CRM filled with junk either turns a sales rep to use their methods of maintaining records or they end up wasting an unnecessary amount of time trying to sort it out. During this time, many people holding off on investing in their companies, you might find yourself with more downtime than usual. It is the perfect opportunity to start tidying up your CRM. You can start by getting rid of any redundant or useless fields, filling in any missing information or activity on prospects and customers, update leads that have fallen through the cracks, and merge duplicates.

Of course, if your CRM is large it could take years to clean it up. If duplicate and outdated leads are a challenge, now is the time to look into getting some of these mundane and time-consuming tasks automated. It will save you a lot of technology frustration, ultimately, creating more time to focus on developing your business, building stronger relationships and reaching a new level of success.

Final words.

While there are many CRM options in the market, each one specializes in different challenges. Pick the CRM that tailors to your goals and business strategy. By using CRM you connect all your workpieces and letting the CRM bring your business to new success.

You can think of your CRM as the new office. With employees working remotely, this is the new home base where everyone on the team can coordinate and keep up to date on what needs to get done. While some of us are still trying to navigate through Skype, Facetime, Slack, Zoom, Google Hangouts and making our home as our office. The CRM was built for the remote worker, collecting, storing and analyzing your data. So, it increases work efficiency and now is the time to leverage your CRM!