Insight & inspiration

Pipedrive is a visual and intuitive CRM system built by salespeople, for salespeople. It makes sales easier and more effective. Read more about the features of an intelligent CRM system that help sales processes stay up to date.

5 Ways to Make CRM Your Personal Assistant CRM systems often are branded rather poorly. The word ‘system’ itself might be somewhat dislikable to many of us and be associated with some massive and cryptic, nonspecific thing with different algorithms. That is why CRM systems should be rebranded as personal assistants of sales management and sales reps because that is what these systems are at their best. Below you can find five ways how you can make a CRM system a very efficient (and ridiculously cheap) personal assistant.   1: Tell the assistant your goals The assistant will help you to focus on the real deal. But to be able to do this, you will have to tell the assistant your goals. It is important to be clear and honest about them. An example of this type of a goal is to close new deals with a certain amount within a certain period of time. This is where a good assistant realises to ask you that how have you previously managed to close deals with the same amount? At this point it is beneficial to let your assistant know how in your case the sales mathematics work. As an example: ·       £15,000 worth of new deals in a month can in your organisation be reached with approximately three new contracts that are worth around £5,000 each. ·       To make one new contract, usually approximately two proposals are being done. It usually takes two proposals to land one new contract. ·       To arrange one appointment, it usually takes about five answered calls from different prospects. ·       On average, it takes five cold calls to get one answered call. That means that your goals in a month should, for example, be something like this (on average): ·       Six proposals ·       18 client meetings ·       90 answered phone calls (prospects) ·       a total of 450 phone calls done Your assistant will visualise your goals on a dashboard (Pipedrive Insights) and will make marks each time you get a step closer to your goals.   2: Let the assistant know what they can do for you  A helpful assistant knows what you should focus on in your work – the tasks that potentially make profit. The assistant should do everything they possibly can on your behalf. The rule of thumb is that if someone else can accomplish 70% of a task independently, you should strongly consider delegating that task to them. When it comes to managing accounts, prospects and leads, there are loads of tasks that can be delegated to your assistant. In the case of a CRM system, it means utilising automations. Your personal assistant (your CRM system) can, for instance, do the following tasks on your behalf: ·       Send an automated email containing your latest blog post e.g., to a potential customer after a meeting (email automations) ·       Create automated tasks for you based on your previously accomplished tasks (automated activities) ·       Automatically reclaim basic information of a company ·       Book a time slot for a meeting for you and a prospect (calendar sync & proposing times) ·       Create reports on your accomplishments on a daily, weekly and/or monthly basis based on what you have done (reporting)   3: A good assistant tells you the current situation and knows how to predict future One of the best features of your assistant is the ability to tell you what you have done and how does your future (forecasts) look like. In the terms of reporting, these two are referred to as lagging and leading indicators. Lagging indicators tell you what has been done already. This could mean phone calls done, meetings held, proposals sent, and deals closed. With leading indicators your assistant can create a financial forecast for the ongoing month if you close your current deals and do not create new ones. It is good to bear in mind that this assistant does have strong mathematical and analytical skills. The assistant can tell you in a blink of an eye that on the top of the deals closed, worth of € 5.000, you will close more deals, worth of approximately £10.000 if you manage to do two more proposals and have 12 more meetings with prospects, given that it actually is possible for the prospects to make decisions within the time remaining.   4: The assistant tells you the most important tasks of the day Assistants tend to have an incredible memory. If you only remember to tell the assistant who you are supposed to contact and when, or when do you have meetings scheduled, the assistant will create you a new list of your tasks of the day, every day. This makes life a lot easier when there is no need to remember what you should take care of today, and instead just focus on reacting to the activities that have been created for you. Your assistant also knows to remind you in case you have not scheduled new tasks, or you are late from deadlines. Here the assistant might give you red warnings to remind you of the tasks and activities you might have forgotten to complete.   5: The assistant will give you credit After finally sending out a proposal or closing a deal, you can always trust your assistant to praise you to the whole organisation or team. The most common way is that the assistant will use the organisation’s chat channel (Slack, Teams, Google Chat etc.) to acknowledge organisation or team know about the deal saving your time, once again.   Lastly… If you have a feeling that your current CRM system does not work like the assistant described in this text, it might be a good idea to take a few steps back and think about