Prialto works closely with sales teams to offload valuable recurring tasks, allowing them to better focus on their clients. Helping executives become more productive within their current systems has allowed us to see what works universally well across organizations.
When Prialto starts working with a new client, we often find that a company’s CRM design itself is a barrier to adoption. Just like Microsoft Word, CRM systems have incredible functionality, most of which goes unused.
We recommend making a system as simple as possible and putting thought into each field tracked.
CRM Tactics
Below are a few best practices we have learned through 100,000+ hours spent supporting Prialto members.
- Turn off unused tabs: There are a number of tabs your team likely isn’t using (dashboards, files, getting started…) that can be turned off to reduce complexity.
- Clean-up page layouts: Most companies use standard page layouts with little customization. Your team is likely not using many of these fields (i.e. fax #, address, home phone, birthday...) which should be removed.
- Leverage structured data: Most standard CRM fields are text-based. The value of data increases dramatically with structured fields using pick-lists (i.e. client status, industry…)
- Add strategic custom fields: Here are several custom fields we find quite useful: Next contact date: Typically, this is the most valuable field in our members' CRMs. Every follow-up is driven off of this field. Referral source: Rather than just tracking lead source, we also suggest linking the record to the contact who provided the referral. Value: Many of our members rank each company and contact in their CRM to allow for quick prioritization.
- Focus on relevant data: A number of lists throughout your CRM system can be customized to allow your team to focus on key data to your business.
- Optimize views: Each module can have customized views to allow your team to leverage your data and quickly prioritize accounts.
- De-duplicate data: As companies grow, data duplication becomes a serious issue. Setup your system early to flag and eliminate duplicates.
- Copy all communication to your CRM: To improve communication across teams, most CRMs allow you to easily add emails to the system by BCC’ing a specific address.
- Integrate a support team: Requiring your sales team to enter data themselves, diverts their attention from clients. Prialto works with sales teams to offload tasks such as CRM data entry and prospect research. To optimize collaboration, we suggest adding additional fields to track status and priority.
