A few years ago, job advertisements were full of phrases: "Looking for a sales manager with his client base." Now the number of such ads has decreased significantly. What is the reason for this? Obviously, a manager with his client base will cost the company more than a specialist to whom the company will provide a corporate client base. In addition, leaving the company of a manager who worked with his base automatically means the “leaving” of his clients.
So, the company provides managers with a corporate client base to work with. What is required from a sales manager? It is necessary to maintain the current base and work to expand it. The manager must enter into the database information about clients, deals, scheduled meetings. This means that all contacts developed by the manager will remain in the company. What is the benefit to the manager? Here we are faced with a psychological barrier - despite the decline in demand for specialists with their client base, managers prefer to collect information about clients in their diaries. Firstly, in this way a personal client base is built up, with which you can work in the future, and secondly, the diary is the manager's “personal space”, where the most important information is stored. How to motivate a manager to work efficiently with a corporate client base?
There is an opinion that it is impossible to implement a CRM system without the support of the company's management. And, indeed, if only sales and the amount of money they earn appear in the assessment of the work of employees, managers have no motivation to work in the CRM system. After all, anyway, no one will check who and what data was filled in by customers. In this situation, the risk increases that, as a result, your corporate client base will not have up-to-date data, contact information will be entered incorrectly or will not be entered at all.
Let's think about what exactly needs to be controlled in the work of managers with a client base? It is necessary to determine the minimum set of data that the manager must enter into the corporate CRM system. For example, if a manager makes an appointment with a client, the database must contain the following: date of the meeting, last name, first name of the client and his contact details, subject of the meeting and its result. If this data is available, you can control the current load of the manager, the quality of filling in the data and the result of his work with clients.
You also need to understand how much time a manager spends on working with a CRM system. If a manager spends half of his working day to fill in the data, then he will have little time for his immediate responsibilities - sales. That is, it is necessary to make working with the client base convenient. The CRM system should allow you to quickly perform frequent operations. For example, if an employee reports on each incoming phone call, it is convenient to use the list of statuses, from which the manager simply selects the desired value: “taken to work”, “completed”, etc. Or if the caller has a wrong number, you should not waste the manager's time on a detailed report on the similarity of phone numbers or the psychological profile of the caller. If information about a phone call enters your CRM system forcibly, regardless of the manager's actions, then it is necessary to automate the processing of this information.
It is important that data from the CRM system appear in reports that analyze the work of managers. It is better if the reports are automatically generated in the CRM system itself, and do not undergo intermediate adjustments in spreadsheets. If this is not possible, at least the data in the report must match the data of the CRM system. In this case, it is obvious to the manager that his indicators in the report directly depend on the quality of maintaining the client base.
When a manager is tasked with filling the CRM system with data, it is necessary to show why it is needed. If you obliged managers to enter customer contact information into the corporate CRM system, use it. For example, a company decided to notify customers of a sale. If a manager incorrectly fills in customer data and cannot provide a list of phone numbers or email addresses for mailing, he will have to contact customers on his own, looking for contact information in diaries and notebooks. At best, after spending a certain amount of time, he will cope with the task. But, most likely, most of his clients will not find out about the opportunity to purchase goods at a profit.
If your managers have a plan for the number of contacts taken, meetings held and deals made, it makes sense to show the progress of the plan online. So that the manager, registering information about the completed transaction in the corporate system, sees that 5 out of 10 transactions have been closed and 5 more are left. Visual "counters" help the manager to quickly navigate the current situation, and the manager - to conduct an express analysis of the manager's base. There is an alternative option for maintaining the "purity" of data in the corporate system - to allocate a separate person to register data in the database. The main advantage is that it is cheaper and easier to teach one person to handle data correctly than an entire department. The main drawback is the load on this operator, which is proportional to the number of managers from whom the request for entering data into the corporate system comes. The best option seems to be a division of labor: the operator, for example, is responsible for entering personal data, and managers are responsible for entering data on their current events.
An additional advantage when sharing access is the preservation of the client's personal data. However, if the CRM system does not allow the division of rights to edit data, or the company's management considers the presence of a specially trained operator inappropriate, this option will have to be abandoned.
So, let's summarize - what is needed for high-quality work of a manager in a corporate CRM system:
1. Manager's control over the maintenance of the client base: if no one checks - why do it? 2. Formation of reports on the work of managers in the CRM-system or the use of data in the reports, so that the manager understands where his indicators come from. 3. Automation of frequently performed operations so that the manager does not spend half of his working day on them. 4. Using the data that the manager enters into the system. If you obliged managers to enter customer contact information into the database, but this data is used only by the manager himself, this reduces his motivation. 5. Visual display of indicators helps the manager and his supervisor to assess the situation online.
