What do you do if your ideal customer base remains elusive despite using CRM?

Simply using a CRM doesn't automatically mean that you will immediately gain insights or access to your ideal customer base. How you add data into your CRM and then maintain that data is much more important than the simple fact of having a CRM. You need to spend additional time and effort ensuring you have a clear strategy on importing and maintaining data in the long run.

1. This might pose a challenge but can also clarify what is going right and wrong for the team and help understand it better. So, when you have problems clear it helps a base to work on as well. Hence, take it up as a data point. 2. Clean the present data to get a clear organized picture of the scenario here and work on that as now you will have the exact scenario in front of you. 3. Update the CRM tools as per market requirements keep learning about the current ones and get help from the vendor team to train you with the demo. 4. Keep learning and be updated in your domain through different online and offline sources that could help you in mentoring or simple suggestions that could tweak your results better. Networking still helps

To address the underperformance of CRMs, especially in large companies, it’s crucial to follow these steps: - Data review: First to evaluate the segmentation variables within the CRM data that are used to identify ideal customers. It’s important to ensure that the most relevant and accurate data is being used for segmentation. - Acquisition review: If the ideal customer profiles are absent or inadequately defined, it necessitates a thorough review of the lead acquisition strategy. - Users skills: It’s also imperative to ensure that the team managing the CRM is well-trained and fully versed in leveraging all the features of the CRM system to effectively segment, target, and nurture leads into ideal customers.

Start by conducting a thorough check of data accuracy within the CRM system to ensure that information is up-to-date and relevant. Align key performance indicators (KPIs) with business objectives to track metrics that truly reflect organizational goals. Provide comprehensive training to CRM users on data entry best practices and report interpretation to enhance their proficiency. Regular audits should be conducted to identify and address errors promptly, ensuring data quality and KPI accuracy. Establish a feedback loop for users to provide input on system usability and performance evaluation processes, enabling continuous improvement in CRM data analysis and decision-making processes.

Your CRM isn't magic. It won't offer up insights you haven't invested in obtaining. Actionable data is really hard to create. If you're not getting where you want to go with your ICP you need to invest in figuring out where and why the prospects you're targeting are falling out of your funnel. If your CRM doesn't have your customer journey milestones mapped and understood, you need to prioritize that as soon as you can. Any goal or plan you have that isn't driven by this data is just optimistic guessing.

I like to compare keeping your data clean to keeping your house clean. Sure, some day to day maintenance and cleaning is always going to be necessary, but nothing you do will change anything meaningfully if you have kids regularly tracking in mud. Your data quality problems are going to be caused by bad data being consistently put in to the system (typically by some integration), or users being asked to manually input way too much information. In either case, identify the worse offenders that are tracking mud into your house and address them. Otherwise you're the parent scrubbing molding with a toothbrush while little Timmy just came in with a mud pie.

"Engage more" - yeah this is probably bad advice. If you don't know who your ICP is than any extra outreach you do is just shotgunning email blasts and hoping for the best. If you do know your ICP really well and you're just not selling to them very well, you need to figure out what sales or product problem you have. Better marketing might get more people in your funnel but it won't resolve whatever the reason is that you're failing to sell to them adequately.

This is really simple. Here's what you do. Step 1 - reconfirm your ICP. This should be based on who you have historically sold well to not just who you *want* to sell to. Step 2 - build tracking into every milestone of the customer's journey. Identify things like volume of leads coming in, how long it takes them to convert to sales opportunities, and how many of those close. Step 3 - identify prospects in your system that are not your ICP, and dial down whatever outreach brought them into your funnel. Getting rid of bad prospects is as important as getting more good ones. Step 4 - for the ones you do want, figure out the places where potential buyers are falling off the trail the most. What you do from there should be self-evident.

Two words - feedback loops. CRMs are essentially just fancy databases, but they're fancy databases that people do their daily work in. We often build processes for people to do that work, but we usually have a very one direction mindset with it. Work flows from marketing to sales to customer success. You need to make sure data flows the other way too. Marketing should have data to understand what kinds of customers renew really well, for example. No mater the business process, make sure that there's easy ways for people to get feedback on the outcomes they've worked on. This is triply important with any process that has handoffs between departments. If you make these feedback loops a core part of your processes, you'll be golden.