At the enterprise level, CRM strategy is just as important as the selection of the tool itself. Organizational planning is critical to the success of any CRM implementation. Here are some examples of creating best practices and workflows to make sure you’re getting the best use (and the highest ROI) out of your CRM. Many best practices at the enterprise level hinge on how you relate the tool to your business processes. This is where creating a CRM strategy comes into play. Business processes can be extremely complex at the enterprise level, so it is crucial to clearly lay out and define a framework in relation to CRM strategy.

CRM Strategy Example #1 – Creating a Sales Pipeline:

Aligning each and every one of your sales and marketing practices with your CRM strategies is the key to creating an enterprise level sales pipeline. Specializing sales roles in conjunction with your strategy first requires understanding of the lead, contact and account hierarchy. Most CRM platforms break up records in your database into leads, contacts (qualified prospects, partners, etc.) and accounts. Sales opportunities are created and associated to contacts, where they can then be closed by the appropriate salesperson. All these processes happen within your CRM platform. Make sure that as records move through your CRM, you are associating the right records (leads and contacts) with the right accounts and opportunities. From there, you’ll be able to assign different sections of the sales pipeline to specialized members of the sales team.

CRM Strategy Example #2 – Workflows (From SugarCRM):

The more complex your business process, and the more hands that are “touching” each account, the more likely you’ll want to use workflows and stops. Workflows help lock down your newly formed sales pipeline and make you more efficient. Workflows can be deployed in many different fashions, and can also be automated according to your sales strategy. In the above example, a workflow is preventing a lead record from being saved in SugarCRM without associating both an account type (prospect, customer, partner, etc.) and the account subtype (the product the lead is associated with). Depending on your business and process, these fields can all be customized to fit your sales terminology and strategy.

Making fields required is only one example of a workflow. Depending on the CRM tool you choose, workflows can be as complex or as automated as you’d like. For example, if a marketer or development rep creates an opportunity for a salesperson, the salesperson could then receive an automated email presenting the opportunity. In our process here at BrainSell, as soon as an opportunity is created for our account execs, they receive an email with an option to accept or reject the opportunity. This is another example of a workflow.

Combining multiple workflows together is at the heart of creating an enterprise level CRM strategy. Here at BrainSell, we often help companies map their processes and formulate customizations and workflows that allow their CRM to provide huge return on investment (ROI).

CRM Strategy Example #3 – Best Practices:

Getting a return on investment (ROI) from CRM requires a good mix of best practices, sales techniques and CRM strategy. We’ve also created a guide detailing our “Top Five Tactics to Get Real Returns on Your CRM”. Downloading the guide will unlock the our top five ROI best practices.

As you scale your sales practice, keep in mind strategy is not limited to CRM. What you connect and integrate to you CRM can unlock whole new worlds of possibilities for your sales people. We’ve even created a CRM add-on section in our site to give you ideas and help you determine which tools are best for your enterprise.