How To Convert Your CRM Tool Into An Early Warning System For Your Sales Teams

Your company’s reputation to deliver on its promises can have a big impact on your sales team’s performance. In an increasingly connected world where good and bad news gets easily amplified, one way to help your sales teams is by having an early warning system for upcoming bad news. This can help your front end team be better prepared to handle a tough situation and even diffuse it in a timely manner.

What does an early warning system mean in the context of the sales function? Your execution team could be project teams, manufacturing teams or devops teams – teams who deliver on the promises the sales team makes. In many scenarios the ability of the sales team to sell depends largely on the confidence and trust they have on the backend operations. This is especially true when you are trying to grow your footprint with your strategic accounts. 

We often see some part of sales compensation tied to product delivery and CSAT more so, for Key Account Management teams. These are ways to align sales compensation to revenue realization.  A strong CSAT is the foundation for retaining, growing and deepening the relationship with your key accounts. You may already be using the CRM for your sales executives to track new sales. How can you make it an even more powerful tool for them? 

Start by giving the right level of visibility on various customer initiatives to your sales teams. The sales executive, as a trusted advisor, can add a lot of value to your customer. A few examples being:

• Sales could look for early warnings of project delays or escalations. This could lead to timely action before it hampers CSAT, add-on sales or renewals.
• A typical sales person interacts with multiple customers and stakeholders and learns a lot through these conversations. They can consolidate the learnings and best practices and advise the customer in forums such as QBRs (quarterly business reviews) or 1-1 executive cadences.
• A trusted sales executive could be a good conduit for the customer to channel constructive feedback to strengthen strategic relationships

You don’t need a heavy integration with a project management tool or an ERP. The key to getting this right is to really understand how the sales and account management executives engage with clients to win business. You may find that different roles in your front end team engage with your clients in different ways. 

Here is a general guideline to design an early warning solution for your sales teams:

• Identify the handful of metrics and milestones that can make an impact on the sales process. 
• Setup a lightweight integration between your production system and Salesforce. 
• Make the information easily available to the sales team and other stakeholders.
• Use the power of the platform to setup automations like alerts, automated tasks and case creation to suggest best practices to deal with early warnings. 
• Make this framework configurable so that it can be adapted for different roles rather than a one size fits all.

The Salesforce platform has a lot of power to bring such an early warning system to life. Hope you make your solutions more impactful by considering the ideas in this blog.

Team Varasi