Structure and optimise your business model in a CRM

Thanks to our previous articles, you have all the keys in hand to build your business model, translate it into your CRM tool and apply it on a daily basis. 

This week, we continue our journey by discovering how to successfully structure your business model and your data in your CRM. Indeed, a good business model can only last if it is based on accessible, relevant, reliable and usable data! Here's how to ensure that it is.

Collect and structure data in your CRM

The problem with data is that it can change very quickly and often needs to be enhanced to remain relevant.

Let's take a simple example: turnover in a company.

How many responses to your e-mailing have you already received of the type "having left the company, etc...". This is why updating your data is ESSENTIAL and even VITAL to keep your business model alive.

COLLECTING DATA VIA CRM

We have already mentioned the importance of using relevant data for the proper functioning of your business model. Apart from centralising all your available data, your CRM tool will allow you to collect very interesting data automatically .

Firstly, there is data that is easily accessible and available but not worth filling in manually: "generic" data such as turnover, for example, is tedious and time consuming to enter manually. Fortunately, it is possible to automate the reception of this type of data via connectors with external sites (such as Corporama). In this way, you can retrieve a lot of information automatically and this frees up time for your sales staff to concentrate on more "sensitive" information. 

In addition to receiving "external" data, you probably have internal data in your company present in other tools (customer invoicing, production tool, etc.). It may be relevant to "bring up" some of this information in your CRM to make the data accessible and usable. 

In the same way, by synchronising your CRM with your information system, you will be able to import the information it contains into other tools and thus avoid all the tedious and error-prone double entries. The objective is that the relevant information benefits everyone. 

Secondly, a CRM tool will allow you to collect so-called "personal" data on the behaviour of your customers / prospects. Thanks to the marketing part of your tool, your customers / prospects will be tracked in order to collect information automatically, allowing you to see for each contact : 

• Which pages of the site they visited - when - and how many times
• If he opened your quote
• If they have read the last email the salesperson sent them
• If it is a return visit (i.e. if a prospect comes back to your site after X amount of time) 
• If they have opened, read or clicked on a button in an e-mailing 
• Etc ...

In short, this is data that you would not have been able to collect without a tool that does it automatically for you. And this data is very valuable for sales people. It allows you to judge the level of interest in a contact, its "potential", and thus to refine and enrich your customer knowledge. A "Bronze" customer who reads all your news emails, clicks on ALL your buttons and visits your service presentation pages may be worth re-qualifying as a "Silver" customer? Or at least it's worth looking into...

Finally, there is the data collected directly by your sales staff. They are an invaluable source for feeding the CRM with information that you will not find anywhere else (number of machine tools installed, internal validation process, etc.). This data is very heterogeneous in nature and will have to be made usable.

But, as we know, salespeople are often very busy and (sometimes) do not take the time to enter all the data in the CRM. However, they are the ones who know your customers best... To overcome this problem, you can easily add mandatory fields when a salesperson creates a new file. It is rather practical when it is an essential data for the good functioning of your business model and when you realise after 6 months that nobody has filled in this field!

STRUCTURING YOUR DATA WITH CRM 

Once again, having data is good, but this data must be centralised, structured and exploitable. Without this, your business model may not last long...

That's a good thing, because your CRM is there to do just that: centralise data on a single platform and make it accessible.

The CRMs have a lot of handy tips to help you with this. Let's take the example of Koban (in all objectivity, of course! : ))

• You have X contacts on an account card. Perfect, but not all contacts are equal... Indeed, you are not going to call the accountant for your estimate, nor the marketing manager for an unpaid invoice. To avoid this kind of bad manipulation, our CRM displays tags above each contact that tell you if it is the billing contact, the decision maker, etc. ..

• In another case, it is possible that you wish to enter information that is specific to your environment and therefore does not exist in your tool as standard. Fortunately, all good CRM tools offer the possibility of adding custom fields or objects that you can add to your customer's file.

Let's take a very concrete example: you sell printers to your customers. Some of them have several machines in the company. It is therefore important that you have a clear and direct view of the machines on each of your customer files. In this case, you can create a custom field dedicated to this information and have it appear in your contact sheets, to collect this data via your sales representatives and make it accessible and usable for your future actions (marketing campaign, segmentation of your base, etc.).

Structuring your business model

BUSINESS PROCESSES 

Your sales model must include the management of the sales cycle and the various processes. And that's good, because a good sales tool is there to help you generate more sales. and more efficiently. 

In your CRM, you will be able to implement your sales process according to the segmentation defined by the sales model (by type of customer, by market, by type of offer, etc.). This process, built around the stages of the sales cycle, will enable you to group together all the commercial opportunities of the same nature, to follow their evolution in the sales process and to easily identify the opportunities that you need to prioritise (for example by classifying them by segment: Gold, Silver and Bronze). This gives you a clear and direct view of all your current opportunities, with their probability of success and their level of progress. 

The CRM will be a real assistant for sales people, allowing them to follow all their commercial activity, not to forget any opportunity and to focus their efforts on the best ones (defined according to your business model of course).