When 2 salespeople contacted the same prospect with different offers, Sarah, CEO of Streamline Solutions Inc (SSI), knew she had a problem. SSI offers litigation support services to law firms and employs 15.
SSI was growing. Its 5 salespeople used spreadsheets, emails, and personal notes to track sales opportunities. SSI wasn’t very “Streamlined” were they?
Sarah was embarrassed and vowed to find a solution!
Managing Prospects
SSI’s sales team was humbled by the mix up and saw the need to improve its sales processes. Sarah and the team listed their needs:
- Share access to contacts to avoid future mix ups.
- Track prospects to project sales and to communicate what is going on.
- Reduce the number of repetitive emails and tasks.
- Create Sales Rep Reminders when prospects have not been touched in 30 days.
- Keep all notes, emails, quotes, and tasks in 1 place.
The team documented its needs and charted next steps.
How to Start
Sarah started SSI 7 years earlier, was a litigation specialist, and loved her customers. She knew nothing about CRMs or Customer Relationship Management software.
What Sarah did know was that she needed:
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- An internal expert.
- “Staff Buy In.”
- Best practices as SSI was not the 1st company to implement a CRM.
- To identify how to use the CRM company-wide and expand its impact.
As CEO, she met with her VPs to seek their thoughts.
The Roadmap
Sarah and her VPs created a Roadmap listing milestones to achieve with dates attached. They researched best practices and prioritized their tasks:
- Internal Expert – Sarah approached Mike, a tech-savvy salesperson, to lead the implementation and serve as the go-to person for questions. Mike was well respected and organized.
- Staff Buy In – Sarah held a staff meeting to share the plan to find a CRM to manage client and prospect relationships. Sarah introduced Mike’s role and shared the roadmap. Mike invited staff to become involved.
- CRM Selection – 5 of 15 employees and Mike tested 8 CRM options and identified 2 candidates. Their final choice was based on vendor reliability.
- Clean Data – The team was excited to clean and standardize their existing customer data.
- Training – SSI invested in comprehensive staff training.
- Consistent Communications – CRM updates were given weekly.
All 15 employees played a role in the CRMs implementation and the CRM was up and running 60 days after its selection.
Business Impact
One year later, what were SSI’s results:
- 25% increase in revenue and 30% increase in sales pipeline value.
- 12 day reduction in its sales cycle based on bottleneck identification.
- Customer inbound requests increased 15% based on automated outreach.
- Each salesperson saved 8 hours per week.
- Sales meeting were efficient as the sales funnel report was available to the team.
The successful CRM implementation paid off!
