I am sure a lot of you have heard of this term but, for those that haven’t, CRM stands for Customer Relation Management. It has been a pretty big buzz in the last few years. CRM software allows you to manage your sales and customer support.

At some point you have used a program like ACT or Goldmine, these programs have been around for years. However, increased bandwidth speeds have allowed companies to build web-based CRM programs that allow for more flexibly and automation. The big players today in the online CRM space include Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Netsuite, SugarCRM and Siebel.

Let me first start out by saying that if you sell to businesses and need to track deals and run reports on how your sales are going, you have to have a CRM solution. Most good solutions these days even include a case study feature so you can track support issues. Your CRM solution should help you track the life cycle of a customer, from the first time you contact them, all the way through closing the deal and having to support them.

I have used most of them, and I can tell you hands down that salesforce.com (SF) is the best program available. As a CEO the best part about a good CRM program is that it gives you a complete view of your sales team and their pipeline. You can create dashboards that allow you to see anything from who has the most money in their pipeline to who has the most deals that have a 90% chance or better at being closed and by when. Salesforce.com, like most CRMs, is completely customizable. You can even build applications specific to your business that sit on top of their appxchange platform. For instance, mobileStorm is currently integrating with Salesforce (SF) so that our customers can pull a report such as “Not contacted within the last 30 days” and send an email, phone call, SMS message or fax broadcast within seconds to whomever fits this criteria. One very important feature is “web-to-lead”, which allows you to integrate any form on your website into Salesforce so that leads are databased and then dished out to your sales team to contact right away. Salesforce also has a great hierarchical system, allowing you to set up your organization so the CEO manages the VP of sales of North America, who oversees the sales manager, who overseas sales reps in different territories. You can give read/write access to anyone you want and restrict who can have access to certain leads or reports. Your employees only see what you want them to see. I suggest, however, giving your sales people access to every record in SF but don’t allow them to read/write if they are not the lead or account owner. This way they can do a quick search to see if anyone is already going after a particular deal.

Lets dive into how I believe is the best way to use salesforce within your organization. First you have to understand the layout; the main components are leads, contacts, accounts and opportunities. A “lead” is someone you are trying to get a hold of or who has not yet told you they are interested in your product/service. An “account” is the organization or company who is either a customer or who you are trying to sell something to. A “contact” is the person who works for the account, and an “opportunity” is the deal you have going with that account/contact.

All new records being added who are not already clients are considered leads. For a lead record you would add things like company name, first/last name, email address, phone number and any other type of data you want to know about that lead, such as how much their company makes or the number of employees they have. You can customize the fields that show up on the lead record. The fields you add to the lead record need to be the things you need to know in order to qualify the lead. In my company, our sales people need to know the size of a leads database and the number of times they send to that database on a monthly basis. You are easily able to add new fields with a drop down menu that says “Database size: 1,000; 2,000; 5,000” etc..

A lead (if hot enough) gets converted into an account. Upon conversation a contact record is automatically created using the leads first/last name, phone number etc. and is then attached to the account. Upon account and contact conversion, you can also have an opportunity record created and attached to the account; however you can always create this at a later date. An organization might have 5 or 10 employees that you are dealing with, and you might have a different deal going with each one of these employees, which is why you can track multiple opportunities and have those opps attached to account, contact, or both. The multiple opportunities you are tracking with an account becomes your sales pipeline. I suggest that each product you have or service you provide has its own opportunity record. For instance, if you are a farm and are selling chickens and pigs to a grocery market, you would want to track each deal as its own separate opportunity. This way you can run a report later to see how many chicken deals you have going vs. how many pig deals and which grocery stores are going to buy what.

My biggest issue with Salesforce is that you cannot start tracking an opportunity until you covert your lead into an account. I have always though that an account was considered a “client”. I mean come on, you’re calling it an “account”. Some genius at salesforce didn’t realize or care about this so as soon as you convert a lead, it becomes an account. If I had it my way, you could track opportunities from the lead record, and it only converts after you have turned it into a paying customer.

I strongly suggest you make your sales team convert a lead into an account as soon as the lead says that they are interested. They don’t have to be sizzling - just a simple “Yes, I would like to know more about your company” and you should be converting this lead into an account. Salesforce allows you to track the stage of the deal so if in a case like this, you are probably going to give it a 10% chance of closing. As you start to massage the deal, that 10% might jump to 50% and then 90% on its way to being 100% closed.

Salesforce is great for forecasting revenue. For instance as the sales manager you can get a snap shot of your entire sales organizations pipeline from the size of the deals and when they will be closed, to the what stage they are at and what is their expected revenue. It also is a great tool to track quotas. You can give each sales person a quota, and salesforce will tell you where they stand each month. You even get an email report sent every Thursday morning on your sales person pipeline and quota.

SF allows me to track where my leads are coming and what is converting. This helps me direct my marketing efforts. If I see a ton of new sign ups coming from a pay-per-click campaign where I am using the work “email marketing program”, then I know I need to start spending more money on that keyword. If I see a bunch of new deals from a partner of ours, maybe I need to pay more attention to that partner and offer them better incentives.

Below is a list of reports I strongly suggest you create and use in your SF account. All reports should be created so you can see what happened today, yesterday, this week, last week, this month, and last month.

1. # of calls made (cold calls, attempts, and regular calls)
2. # of emails sent
3. # of meetings
4. # of leads converted with conversion history (i.e. what leads have converted into dollars)
5. Deals by stage (10%, 20%, 30% etc..)
6. Lead source (i.e. client referral, website form, reseller, ppc campaign etc..)
7. Leads by industry (i.e. aerospace, hospitality, car dealer etc..)
8. Top selling products or services
9. Top sales producers and revenue closed

SF is a great tool for staying on top of your sales team. For instance you can log in and run a dashboard report that shows an odometer of how many calls someone is expected to make verses how many they actually made. If you see they are not close to hitting their daily goal, you can have a quick chat with them and get them back on track.

Overall a good CRM is a must have if you want your organization to flourish and be successful, and Salesforce is the best CRM on the market.

Let me know if you are interested, and I will make you an introduction to our Salesforce account manager and make sure you get a discount.