Your CRM dashboard can be really useful in helping you adapt to the buying patterns of your sales leads. Often people struggle with deciding what to measure, but no one really doubts that getting the data is useful.
In the 1950’s Edward Deming revolutionized manufacturing with his “Plan-Do-Check-Act” cycle. Since then, few have questioned the benefit of using data from your current operations to inform future improvement.
What to Measure
There are an endless number of things you can measure with a good CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) that is integrated with your email marketing. If you try to monitor too many things, your efforts will be counterproductive.
William Bond, VP at Forrester Research asks “What will we get for our money?” in his report called “Quantify the Business Value of CRM”. Carefully planning your metrics makes a big difference in the profitability of your efforts.
Two Steps to Identify Profitable Metrics
1. Define business goals: What do you want to accomplish? You will gather different data to increase revenue per customer than you would for better lead conversion ratios. Although they may be related, the cost of customer acquisition is monitored with different metrics than when your goal is to reduce response time for new leads.
2. Strategize with your CRM software: Once you are clear on your most pressing business goals, you can use your CRM to establish what needs to be monitored. Identify the tactics needed to reach that goal and keep track with CRM automation.
While this two-step process may appear to be too simplistic, without it you cannot quantify the benefits of metrics at all. You need to know where you are going. Without the goal in front of you, all the numbers take on a bit of “Alice in Wonderland” fantasy. Use the philosophy of Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat and get clear on your goals first.
Start Slow and Steady
William Bond, mentioned previously, says that people always ask what should be measured. His answer is to determine what tactic you want to implement…then track that.
The value of your online CRM metrics is cumulative, so don’t think you need to get it all going at one time. Instead, it starts with one goal…determine the tactics you want to use to accomplish the goal…then measure those tactics.
Don’t look outside your own organization to find wisdom about what to measure. No one knows your company as well as you and your team. Instead, invest the time to have a strategy session about what you want to accomplish. From the list of goals, choose just one.
As you get used to monitoring this metric, add the second highest priority tactic and continue until you can scan your dashboard and quickly confirm where you are on target and what tactics are falling short of your goals.