Increase productivity with a CRM
Customer relationship management (CRM) software has become an essential tool for businesses of all sizes to improve productivity while helping them focus on key tasks, saving time and money, and improving customer relationships.
A good CRM can help you manage your time more effectively, track projects, and multitask efficiently, whether you're working in the office or remotely, without working for longer hours every day.
In this article, we'll look at some practical tips on how you can increase productivity using a CRM that you can incorporate into your own work routine. From capturing leads to automating processes, here are the 13 ways you can improve your productivity using a CRM.
Utilise the reporting feature to keep track of your pipeline and opportunities
The data in your CRM can tell a story. It can provide you with a view of potential risks and opportunities for your business. This helps you understand the key areas that need to be improved, and the issues you need to resolve to lift performance.
Reporting should be used generate an overview of your business performance. You can identify the potential areas for improvement to develop new strategies on how you can grow your pipeline, improve your sales and prevent future risks.
Use a mobile app to monitor your CRM
We live in a ‘on-the-go’ era where we can do anything on our mobile devices. This includes accessing and managing your CRM so you can take notes, assign tasks and plan your next activity while away from your computer.
Downloading the mobile app version of your CRM is a great way to keep track of your CRM activities because it is always on the go with you. It also has many features that make it easy to use and monitor what happens in your CRM data.
Control your team members’ access to features
It is important to create a set of permissions for featuresand data that are available to your team members.
The first step in managing access for your team members is determining what features they need. That means every time a new team member joins, you should have a clear understanding of what their roles are and which features they would need access to. Use PIpedrive’s permissions and visibility settings to manage what users can see and do.
Monitor your sales
Staying organised by tracking your activities and deals in your CRM. It is important to track and keep in contact with your prpsects on a regular basis. That way, you can easily monitor your progress and make sure you're staying on track to hit your goals.
CRM software like Pipedrive can help you streamline your sales pipeline by creating an overview of your deals and activities. This also allows you to manage your time, prevent data duplication, and reduce admin overheads.
Another crucial part of improving your productivity is keeping track of all your activities in one central location without having to dig through dozens of spreadsheets or word documents to find the information you need. Pipedrive CRM allows you to filter and search your database in a way that enables you to find the info you need quickly and helps you stay organised.
Syncing calendars and activities/tasks is another great feature offered by most CRM applications. This means you can plan tasks and reminders according to specific events on your calendar while helping you focus on other major tasks and get things done efficiently.
Managing your activity allows you to keep track of progress and easily see where you are at with all of your sales opportunities. By this, you can ensure you’re hitting your goals and continue working toward increasing your revenue without sacrificing your time.
Automate your sales workflow for more efficiency
Tasks such as following up on leads, sending personalised emails, and scheduling meetings can be time-consuming and easy to forget about if you don't keep on top of them regularly.
Automating your process will help you get a controlled and measured sales workflow that optimises customer acquisition and lead conversion.
Here are the seven sales tasks that you can easily automate to increase productivity:
- Send personalised automated emails: Keep your leads warm and updated by sending personalised, automated emails when deals or leads reach a set stage in your pipeline. Use these touch points as a stepping stone towards building stronger relationships and ultimately closing more deals.
- Change ownership of a deal when a sale progresses: You can automate the transfer ownership of a deal to other senior staff without losing any previous history. This transfers everything to the new owner so they don't have to go back and forth with previous notes and activities.
- Create a follow-up task for newly added contacts: Automatically assign follow-up tasks to any contact that is added to a sales pipeline so that new prospects aren't forgotten and you don't miss a valuable opportunity.
- Better pipeline management: Manage your deals at a glance and see where each lead is in the certain sales process so you can prioritise your time and close more deals.
- Track prospect's activity in your pipeline: Track all activities of your leads so that you can gauge their level of interest, manage engagement with your business such as email opens, and emails sent, as well as automatically schedule activities.
- Add contact information: Import information from survey services, third-party databases, social media, and files to automatically add data to your contact records.
- Qualification and scoring of leads: With automatic lead scoring and lead qualification tools, you can prioritise incoming leads based on their fit with your criteria and improve your lead-vetting process.
Setting up these automations improve the overall employee productivity and efficiency of your sales processes by eliminating manual tasks, freeing up time to focus on the critical areas of your business, and driving higher revenue for your business.
Centralise your documentation
Centralising your documentation is key to a successful CRM and sales process. The more streamlined your process, the easier for your team to complete their tasks. This will also assist your team members in performing repeatable actions and access resources that can save them time while making your process scalable and making better sales decisions for your business.
CRM Integration with other apps and tools
If you're using a CRM to manage your sales, marketing, and customer relationships, it's important to integrate it with other tools to get a complete view of your business.
Copying data manually between tools is inefficient, prone to error, and may leave other important tasks for your employees to complete within the day.
Integrations will allow you to prevent these inefficiencies by automating the process and ensuring accurate data transfers. For example, you can integrate with an Email Service Provider to track opens and clicks for your emails, or upload leads from your website directly into your CRM.
If you're just starting, get started with one or two products and get familiar with the product before you start switching. The CRMs that work best in your ecosystem will typically be the ones that are easiest to use. You may want to investigate options for your situation.
Capture leads effectively
A CRM system can be used to capture leads with minimal effort. Data may come from online enquiries, web forms or contact forms, and downloads which can be imported to the CRM automatically.
Chatbots can be a great tool to get high-quality leads by helping leads with what they need.
They can be a good way to get people to provide their contact information in order to receive more information about your company and products.
Work together on deals
The team will be able to work together more effectively using a CRM by accessing each other's contact information, tasks, and leads, accessing the latest updates on leads and deals, and monitoring the progress of individual tasks.
This will help them save time and improve their productivity by tagging the team members to notify them to take over the task and share what needs to be done efficiently.
Access information efficiently with labels and filters
Labels and filters are two important features that can be used to access information quickly. Labels are used to categorise contacts and make it easier for the user to find them. Filters can be applied to a contact list or campaign, which then displays the desired information.
If you’re using a cloud-based CRM like Pipedrive, you can create custom labels and filters to suit your needs and have as many as you want. Additionally, you can share these with your team so they can have quick access to all the information or function in just one click.
Take better accurate notes
Note taking is a process of recording information in a way that can be easily retrieved. It is most commonly used in the context of meetings and lectures.
CRM helps you develop your skills in note-taking to make the process easier when capturing new information on leads and deals, notes on follow-up, highlighting important details to do next, and sharing information with your colleague.
Get your work done with its user-friendly interface
The good thing about a CRM system is that it not only provides an efficient way of managing customer interactions and sales automations but also provides a user-friendly interface that helps in making things easy for the users.
It will help you in managing your sales pipeline and marketing campaigns with ease while saving time on performing other tasks and getting the job done quickly.
It's important that you choose the right CRM that not only suits your business needs but also allows you to use it easily with your team to achieve your goals more effectively.
Improve your customer relationship
CRM software like Pipedrive can help businesses better understand their customers by providing them with insights into data-driven demographics and trends. This information can be used to create more targeted marketing campaigns that will resonate with the customer base to get more high-quality leads and improve the sales of your business.
Final Thoughts
There are many benefits to using CRM. It is a useful tool for managing sales, leads and prospects. CRM can also help you and your team to stay organised and productive, whether you are working remotely or within the office. CRM software such as Pipedrive helps businesses because it saves time, increases productivity, and improves customer satisfaction. It provides a platform for sales and marketing teams to store, organise, and track their leads and sales.
Do you need help in managing your sales automation and process? Motii is a leading partner of Pipedrive to help you improve productivity, drive more sales, grow your business and empower your sales teams!