By now, most businesses have realized the value of implementing a CRM to keep track of their relationships. From documenting interactions with prospects, to tracking sales activities, to recording opportunity progress and beyond, CRMs can do a lot.
But despite their advancing technology and robust capabilities, there are gaps in what a CRM can do. Many businesses implement a CRM and think that’s all they need to do to realize the results they want – but a CRM alone is not enough. In a time when customer-centricity is no longer optional, your tech stack needs to evolve to include more than just a CRM.
Now, we aren’t going to go as far as others and say you no longer need a CRM, or that they’re obsolete – that’s a bit unrealistic. But what we will say is you can’t stop there, because a CRM is not enough on its own to support a truly customer-centric business.
To achieve success, you need to supplement your CRM with a Sales Performance Management solution that enables you to do more with your CRM data. But what do we mean when we say “do more?”
We’ll give you specific examples.
The following are some of the most impactful limitations of a CRM-only tech stack – and how they’re overcome by a solution like LevelEleven.
Lack of Clear Focus
With a CRM alone, you have an overwhelming amount of data. It’s hard to know what to focus on (whether you are a sales rep or manager) and this makes for a less-than-motivating environment. The only way to visually represent all this data is with reports or dashboards, and these have their own limitations.
CRM dashboards are great for showing sales activity, but they’re static and usually show the same metrics every single month – pipeline, opportunities created, closed deals, etc. Eventually, this becomes background noise to sales reps who look at the same thing every day.
Dashboards don’t drive your sales team to improve because they don’t hold their focus, spark motivation or provide a real-time view of only the most critically important metrics. They also lack built-in goal setting and tracking capabilities that help guide everyone on the sales team towards reaching their targets.
But a Sales Performance Management solution like LevelEleven summarizes all of the most important information in an understandable way and allows you to combine gamification with your CRM to get your team engaged and motivated to perform, focusing on the right activities that will guarantee success.
Create competitions with Contests and leaderboards to generate excitement, and highlight important activities that are critical to successful behaviors. Recognize your team members who are performing well with accolades and Badges, and drive some healthy competition with leaderboards.
Yes, a CRM will record your sales team’s activities, but not always in the most digestible way. A Sales Performance Management solution like LevelEleven summarizes what you should be doing in an understandable way and helps your team focus on the right activities that will guarantee success, motivating them to improve their performance.
Reactive, Not Proactive
With a CRM, you can only see lagging indicators with reports & dashboards – what has already happened. By the time you realize there is a problem with a sales rep’s performance, it is already too late. You need a solution that will show you where you really are and where you’re going, not just where you’ve been.
LevelEleven makes it easy to pinpoint when performance is lagging, so you can course-correct sooner. No more waiting until you notice sales are down to dig into what’s going on and try to correct the problem – by then it’s probably already too late.
Sales Performance Management solutions are made to support a disciplined strategy that builds successful behaviors, helps improve skills and performance, and fixes problems in the moment to get reps back on track. With this real-time visibility into activities and performance, sales leaders have the opportunity to coach under-performers and initiate improvements while there is still time to get back on track.
When you have a clear understanding of each sales person’s performance using metrics and progress tracking, it makes it much easier to coach people to improve. Leaders can easily diagnose where the problem lies so they can coach appropriately.
Visibility Without Clear Insights
Perhaps one of the biggest limitations of a CRM is that it gives you incomplete information without context.
A CRM effectively serves its purpose as a repository of data and information, but the way it presents that data is ineffective. Using a CRM alone, for example, you have to pull information from different places and piece it all together, filling in the missing context on your own. You also have to sort through thousands of data points to determine which will provide you with the answers you’re looking for, and tune out the rest.
However, combined with a solution like LevelEleven, you can visualize all of your most important information in one spot within your CRM so you can instantly understand how your team is performing. LevelEleven’s Manager Scorecard and Performance Scorecards help accomplish this.
If you’re unfamiliar, a scorecard is a visual representation of a business or individual’s progress, over time, toward a certain goal or metric. Often, scorecards are used to track KPIs for sales development reps or sales teams.
Unlike dashboards, a scorecard shows progress toward a goal over time, rather than a status at one specific point in time. This progress, or history, is where you find the valuable insights.
A sales manager can take a look at their LevelEleven Manager Scorecard and see exactly where their team stands. You get an overview of team member performance and how your teams are pacing towards target goals in real-time.
With insight into the relationships between top-, medium- and low-performing team members, you’re able to understand instantly if reps are focusing on the right activities to achieve their goals.
This allows managers to deploy short-term, laser-guided sales contests around key activities that will improve any key metrics that need a boost, for example, or set up coaching sessions around areas where a team member is consistently falling short.
This is where you find that context that is so critical to improving performance.
Don’t Settle For Just A CRM
Implementing and maintaining a CRM is only half the battle. To be successful in today’s digital era, you need to go beyond a CRM with a more robust tech stack, and a Sales Performance Management solution like LevelEleven is the perfect way to do that.
With the addition of a Sales Performance Management solution, your CRM can accomplish the following – and more:
- Achieve focus by simplifying & unifying your process
- Ensure everyone knows where they stand and what is expected of them
- Identify gaps in and improve individual & team performance
- Organize, support & drive your strategy in a deliberate, focused way
To learn more about how LevelEleven can elevate your CRM, watch our demo here.
