Are inefficient CRM meeting notes contributing to lost revenue?
The Customer Relationship Management (CRM) value chain has undergone significant innovation in the last decade, from marketing outreach, automated customer journey’s, health scores, digital contracts – the list is endless! However, one key outlier in this rapid innovation is the way in which sales and customer success teams contribute meeting notes and activities to the CRM platform.
For as long as CRM platforms have existed, sales teams have contributed meeting notes in the same inefficient way; either typing data in a large ‘white box’ against the Account / Contact record or uploading a word doc containing huge amount of data. The issues here are numerous:
Meeting note data is completely unstructured
Each meeting note sits in isolation in its own independent file
The build-up of thousands of independent, unstructured meeting notes over time renders it close to impossible to aggregate and analyse this data in any meaningful fashion
The repetition of the issues above will result in large amounts of lost data to the organisation
As a result, sales team are often required to duplicate processes to deliver data in custom spreadsheets and internal reports rather than focusing on value-add sales activities
A recent study from mycustomer.com found that 86% of enterprise CRM data is unstructured and meeting notes are major contributor to this issue. The downstream impact being that huge amounts of customer insights are left untapped and businesses are taking strategic decisions based on insufficient and incomplete data.
As a result, a Validaty Inc survey of 1,200+ CRM professionals found that 44% of respondents estimated that their company loses over 10% in annual revenue due to poor-quality CRM data.
Meeting note data should be a critical source of information covering a number of topics, such as:
Market activity and developing trends
Product feedback and ideas for future developments
Client and prospect sentiment towards your products and services
Competitor activity across key markets
However, in many cases these key data points are scattered across the business, in notepads, email chains and in the sales reps’ heads. A 2019 Asensus study of B2B organisations found that 50% of businesses DO NOT conduct any form of structured competitive analysis and there is no ownership for the process to collect, aggregate and present market insights to underpin business decision making.
Client and Prospect meeting data should play a key role to define business strategy but why are sales team still entering unstructured text into a ‘white box’ in the CRM that is not being read? How much data are you losing and what is your source of market intel?
Small tweaks in the way sales team interact with the CRM can have a significantly positive impact on the business, such as:
A reduction in duplicate reporting activities outside the CRM allowing sales team to focus on more value-add client facing activities
Through structured and aggregated meeting notes, business leaders will receive a continuous flow of data on market trends, product feedback and competitor activity
A more engaged sales function who feel part of the business strategy
An increased RoI from your CRM strategy
Read our blogs on ‘5 ways to add rocket fuel to your CRM strategy’ and ‘The highly valuable yet overlooked data source all businesses have’.
Asensus has revolutionised this area of the CRM value chain by utilising Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning models to turn unstructured CRM data into deal winning insights, whilst increasing the CRM adoption to 90%.
Contact Asensus and see how our CRM integrated dashboards deliver instant structure to CRM data, empowering your business with detailed product, competitor and market insights in order to stay ahead of market.