The True Cost of Inefficient CRM Data

According to a recent article published by Selling Power, sales managers spend a whopping 37% of their time forecasting sales. Many sales managers still rely solely on CRM to process lead activity and opportunities, however the general adoption and usage of CRM is still highly subjective and interaction can vary dramatically from team member to team member, which doesn’t lend itself to a highly accurate portrayal of cross-team performance.

While CRM can be used to track and organize pipelines, sales managers should also be looking for new ways to project sales wins and losses while getting their team to adopt the same processes and principles across the board. One way to ensure that sales reps are hitting their calling goals and inputting accurate information into CRM is to utilize a tool like Gryphon App for Salesforce.com with Click-to-Dial and automatic call logging.

With a simple download, a Click-to-Dial icon will be placed right next to a particular record’s phone number in Salesforce. Reps simply click the icon to make the call. Using this innovative app, all call details are automatically recorded (including the voice conversation in stereo if needed) and sales reps will be prompted to enter a call result (disposition) to append a follow-up action all within one simple workflow. The best part for reps is that there is no need to manually update CRM….call results are automatically entered into CRM for them. For managers, this eliminates the visibility gap that often exists between what a rep enters into CRM, and what a rep is actually doing!

Once a sales manager can rely on the data they see in CRM, s/he can establish an activity standard and set activity benchmarks based on the behaviors of top performers and can focus on the coaching and training that will matter the most, as opposed to wasting time tracking down their team members in order to get a verbal account of their monthly forecast. This data will also enable a sales manager to manage the activities that are predictive of revenue rather than simply managing the forecasted opportunity against historical experience.