5 ways to add rocket fuel to your CRM strategy
What is the purpose of sales admin and meeting note taking in your organisation? Is it a means of tracking activity and box-ticking or is it used as part of a business-wide information sharing and collaboration strategy? If the latter, then I would suggest that you are in the minority.
First, why should commercial teams bother with meeting notes?
No one ever reads meeting notes, right? In most cases it is true, and it’s about time this time-consuming activity is urgently re-defined. Commercial teams are one of the best data sources available to organisations and if utilised properly, can have a very positive impact on business performance.
In most, if not all unregulated industries, meeting notes are sporadic in content and unstructured in format. This can lead to key pieces of information regarding client sentiment and competitor activity being overlooked and lost. One contributing factor is the technology made available to client facing teams in order to complete this work, which normally involves a rich text editor, otherwise known as a ‘big white box’.
It may seem a trivial subject, however, consider the depth of market intel picked up by your sales team, which is either; 1) Lost in the CRM, 2) Mentioned in an internal meeting and quickly forgotten or worse, 3) Never captured in the CRM.
So, how do you turn unstructured notes and CRM content into actionable insight? Here are 5 key tips:
1. Incentivise the process
Front line commercial teams can be one of the best data sources an organisation has at its disposal and admin no longer needs to be the ‘stick’ but can become the ‘carrot’. The first step is to take a top-down approach and show that meeting feedback is playing its part in the process of continuous business improvement. The ‘carrot’ comes with the knowledge that key information is being used to improve products and services, which in turn increases the chances of sales teams hitting their numbers.
2. Define the context
Don’t just provide a ‘big white box’ for commercial team members to enter meeting notes - the unstructured nature of this data will render it almost impossible to aggregate and use for any meaningful analysis of market trends. Here’s where technology has a big role to play by providing structure to inbound content and then automatically aggregating and presenting to senior decision makers, who are shaping the future direction of the business.
3. Guide the user
Provide context on the data points you would like commercial teams to collect from the market. This will differ based on the type of meeting taking place, for example, you may wish to collect detailed product feedback and development ideas when delivering product demos to prospects. Whereas, with client review meetings, you may wish to measure the sentiment of the client and their on-going views on the service they receive.
4. Take a ‘less is more’ approach
There is power in brevity! When Twitter increased its character limit from 140 to 280, it had little impact on the average size of Tweets, with only 1% hitting the 280-character limit. People have become accustomed to delivering pertinent points in short soundbites as they have found that this is the most effective method of getting their message across. Therefore, taking this into the CRM — a short, structured set of news stories which are then aggregated on a set of dashboards, is infinitely more powerful than a 1000+ word meeting note, which often goes unread.
5. Reduce the admin burden
It is imperative to keep the process simple and tied into the users’ daily workflows with no duplication of work. Therefore, providing the user with an efficient process to document key news stories whilst seamlessly creating follow up tasks, will significantly increase the chances of adoption.
Bonus points — create a collaboration culture as a result
Most importantly, the key is to develop a culture of information-sharing and collaboration across the organisation. The benefits of this approach are numerous and will help to solve problems more efficiently, boost morale and bring teams closer together.
Businesses who can identify key risks and opportunities and seamlessly back this up with structured data points, will be able to increase the speed to market for new products and services, keeping their business one step ahead of the competition.
The asensus solution
At asensus, we believe that commercial teams are one of the greatest data sources available to organisations and creating an efficient and engaged collaboration process, from the top-down, can have significant benefits to the bottom line.
Contact asensus to learn how our CRM integrated software can minimise the administration burden while maximising the structured content that can be collected from the marketplace to shape the future strategy of your business.
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Paul Smillie, Founder of Asensus
