Navigating the long road to CRM value

As I started this article, I had a feeling of déjà vu... In 2019, I wrote?Help! Why is No One Using Our CRM??Revisiting it, I realised the advice still holds, but with five more years of experience, I’ve gained a broader view on how to drive true organisational value from your CRM.

That first article focused on the “carrots,” making sure that your team wants (or even needs) to use the CRM. This time, I want to talk about some of the harder metrics (and maybe some of the “sticks”).

What gets measured gets managed!

Everyone knows this old chestnut. And if you are not measuring and managing your CRM value, it is never too late to start! The thing is to measure and manage the right things. Start with why you expected ROI from your CRM in the first place. Was it to grow revenue? Increase customer satisfaction and retention? Boost productivity?

The challenge? Designing metrics that drive your desired outcomes. Many CRMs have built-in tools, but they need to align with your goals:

• Growing revenue with CRM metrics Consider metrics like conversion rates at each pipeline stage or the speed of customer conversion (Pipeline Velocity). Look for actionable chunks—by sales rep or channel—or any lens that lets you adapt the CRM or team strategy based on real results.
• Boosting customer satisfaction You already measure customer satisfaction, right? If not, you might want to start ?? Use CRM to track drivers of customer satisfaction. Is it problem resolution time? Do some team members achieve better outcomes? Identify and measure what they’re doing differently.
• Streamlining productivity This can be the easiest or the hardest thing. How much time is the team spending on key tasks? You can track productivity by output (emails responded to, marketing emails sent). But often, less-defined areas—like teamwork and automation—drive the biggest wins. Are your team collaborating more effectively to deliver customer outcomes and wasting less time on follow-up and miscommunication? Can automation now accomplish what previously required more staff? (Ideally, these efforts are growing revenue too!)

In all of these cases, I’m trying to send you down the path of finding the leading indicators—what you and your team can do to change future outcomes. The classic lagging indicator—the sales result—is always like looking in the rearview mirror. You’ve already gone past it, so what’s the point? Unless you are using the data to understand what is working and what is not, of course.

Before you run off and try to implement everything… Unless you have a massive team, you won’t do all of these at once. Or even ever. If you can find a few metrics that tell you about the health of your customer-facing activities—whether it’s a simple pipeline conversion report or comparisons of sales results to specific marketing or sales campaigns or activities. Even if you start with one thing and use it to improve either your CRM or what your team is doing, that is the first step towards a win.

What to do with this information?

Sorry to all the developers out there—but having a bunch of reports available never changed anything for anyone! Reports only matter if people use them to make decisions and drive behaviour change.

Managers—this one is for you! How can you insert the review of these metrics into your process? Are you reviewing them with your team in your 1:1s or team meetings? Using leaderboards can be effective in some competitive teams. In some cases, the key metrics can also become part of the performance management system—part of an incentive scheme or simply day-to-day performance management. Be careful with this one, though. Using the wrong metric WILL lead to unintended consequences—as all of us who have toyed with using only volume metrics (e.g., number of sales calls) without any link to the quality of those activities have found out…

So many versions of this are relevant to different types of businesses and CRM implementations, I can’t possibly cover every example of important or even useful tracking I’ve seen over the years.

Have a unique CRM goal? Reach out, and let’s explore how tailored metrics can drive the results you need.