You already use your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to enhance your understanding of potential partnerships and strengthen your relationship with existing clients. But did you know that you can also harness the potential of your CRM to improve productivity across different areas of your business?

It’s not only your sales and marketing team that will benefit from innovative CRM solutions like Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, Zendesk and HubSpot; customer service, HR, supply chain and partner management teams all stand to benefit.

So, once you’ve established the customer management benefits of your CRM solution, how can you leverage it to promote productivity? Here are five key uses you may have never considered before.

Automate tasks in your sales workflow

Creating a sales workflow is one of the key stages of any sales process, mapping out the stages required to close. Automating repetitive tasks helps to drive efficiency and improve employee productivity by minimising the time spent on administrative tasks. You can use your CRM to automatically send personalised emails to keep prospects warm, change the owner of a deal when it progresses to the next stage, create follow up tasks when contacts are added, or import contact information.

Additionally, you can use your CRM to automate monitoring and management services. You can track contact engagement against specific metrics like the number of emails opened. You can then monitor your pipeline and establish an automated flagging system when a deal spends too long without contact. Automating these stages helps to ensure that the sales deal continues to progress as it should, without expending excessive manpower on monitoring.

Promote collaborative deals

Many CRM systems allow your team to work on deals collaboratively, increasing the likelihood that the sale will complete. Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce both allow you to mention other users in comments, allowing them to easily identify where their assistance is needed and jump straight into work.

More and more CRMs have record tagging capabilities that assist with categorising views, lists and dashboards, making it easier and more efficient for other users to find necessary information for deals.

Enhance understanding of customers

Every deal requires a clear picture of customer behaviours and needs. Your CRM can provide detailed insights to support the sales qualification process. You can evaluate key trends such as how demographic data relates to deal size, the average time it takes to close a deal by persona, and common reasons for lost deals. This helps your sales team to assess and rectify any issues with their pipeline, reinforce personas and inject productivity back into the qualification process.

Identify potential risks and opportunities

CRM dashboards offer a unified view of essential information and business performance. Key reports and insights are accessible at your fingertips, helping you to identify issues and understand areas that need improvement. On your dashboard, you should pin key insights such as leads and deals by source, the number of deals in your pipeline, the average size of each deal, the average time it takes to close a deal, and your closing ratio.

Based on the trends that emerge, you will be able to identify any potential risks to your business, such as your conversion rates dropping at a particular stage, or your average deal rate falling. This unparalleled insight will allow you to make the necessary changes to prevent these risks from becoming problematic and disruptive to your operations – or to recognise and act upon key opportunities to enhance your sales process.

Integrate your CRM with other tools

Integrating your CRM with other powerful tools will enhance its existing capabilities and boost productivity. One of the most essential areas that can be optimised by third-party tools or applications is communication. Without effective client communication, your business will struggle to make successful strides forward. As communication is the backbone of your business, you should strive to make it as seamless and efficient as possible. That’s where a solution like Solgari comes in.

Solgari is a Cloud-based communications solution that integrates with your existing CRM solution. Without ever leaving your CRM window you can communicate with clients through any channel of your choice, including voice, video, chat, SMS, WhatsApp and social media. You can eliminate the time-consuming, distracting need to switch between different windows and systems: Solgari delivers an all-channel communication endpoint directly into your CRM screen, enabling the highest speed to value.

With a range of other impressive functions, including industry-specific automation, compliance out-of-the-box, and a golden unified data source for powerful analytics, Solgari adds extensive value to your CRM.

To discover more about how Solgari can optimise the effectiveness of your CRM solution and increase the productivity of your business, get in touch with one of our representatives today. The key to transformative communication is just a few clicks away.

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