Why you the Sales Rep should use a CRM.I was driving home from a long day on the road doing sales calls, when I received a call from the Management team with a specific question. They needed to know (in a relatively quick fashion) how many customers in the rural town I have called on for the past 2 years, that have expressed a need for a specialized transportation service which was not part of our offering. Really, why would I ask these questions if we do not offer it?
I quickly thought to myself the ramifications of this question; what were they truly trying to figure out? Were they testing me? I could not stop wondering if maybe I missed something. Since I was driving, they agreed to let me get back to them with the answer. This should be easy I said to myself as we were using a Major CRM product and I was very diligent in entering my conversations I had with customers.
Luckily for me I had experience with Excel from a previous life. I exported the file from the CRM, applied the auto filter and narrowed down the meetings to a few hundred. With coffee in hand, I started to read the meeting notes, when I came across a meeting which mentioned a conversation I had with a prospect talking about specialized transportation service. Funny, I couldn't remember the meeting but after reading the notes it all came back to me. There were some keywords that I had used in the meeting , I thought to myself, I'm sure I must have used the same conversation tactics with other customers. One by one, I searched my Excel spreadsheet for the same keywords and it narrowed the list down even further, three hours later I found a relatively small list of customers that expressed a need for this transportation service. At the time of me writing the notes in the CRM I did not think that I would have much use of these types of meeting notes. I sold myself on the idea that the reason I wear my seatbelt is in case of an accident, so that's probably why I wrote down everything, just in case the car crashed, or the company changed direction. I finished my coffee, sent the email with the small list to the management team, and said to myself “wow I’m glad I wore my seat belt!” Some CRM Productivity Statistics:
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