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?
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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.  
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Photo by Nathana Rebouças on Unsplash
​When I got home I fired up the laptop, signed into the VPN and pulled my meeting details for the last 2 years. Boom.  I had over 4000 meeting notes to go through, on top of my regular end of day duties. Boy was I excited at the functionality of the CRM,  but soon I realized that this was going to be a labour intensive process. I asked Google for some suggestions and I was given more suggestions than the meetings I had to review.

​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:
  • 75% of sales managers say that using a CRM helps to drive and increase sales. (Hubspot)
  • CRM system adoption increases sales by up to 29%. (Salesforce)
  • The average CRM ROI is $5.60 for every dollar spent. (Baseline)
  • A CRM can increase revenue by a whopping 41% per salesperson. (Trackvia)
  • Three out of four consumers say they spent more money with a company because of a positive customer experience. (Global Customer Service Study)
  • 65% of sales reps who have adopted mobile CRM have achieved their sales quotas while only 22% of reps using non-mobile CRM have reached the same targets. (Innoppl Technologies)


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​My Sales Rep