CRM: The Sales Professional’s Favorite Productivity Tool

CRM is an amazing productivity tool for effective selling.  You may not realize the convenience of CRM unless you experienced what it was like to be in sales before the widespread use of CRM.  I remember the days when I conducted my sales without internet-connected computers.  I worked in sales from my remote office in New York and the company’s contacts were maintained in a database in New Jersey. To track contacts, we had to print our customer information on index cards and write notes on the back about our activities, similar to a Rolodex. Our CRM was powered by a manual system.
 
Fortunately, we had an electronic marketing database in the company’s New Jersey office, but that also had many drawbacks including: 

• Only one person had access to the database and was in charge of keeping it up-to-date.  
• As a sales person, I needed to query my contacts in many different ways, but anything other than an alphabetical query was tedious and time-consuming.  If I needed a list of my customers by area, it had to be accomplished by requesting a printed list from the marketing database.  Such lists were very limited and thus most queries had to be done manually separating contacts by importance, sales volume, product line or last sales —which took a lot of time and was very ineffective. 
• My other struggle with this manual system was the need to create sales reports for my various managers.  All reporting was manual, time-intensive and the reports were often obsolete by the time they were submitted.

 Times have certainly changed for the better since then:

• In most organizations, every employee has access to CRM.  Everyone can take care of their own information updates in real time with a web-based system like Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
• Queries are easy to accomplish based on virtually any criteria you choose and can be saved for future use for an almost instant view. 
• Reporting can be done on-the-fly with CRM via graphical dashboards and easy export to Microsoft Excel. Amazing analytics are available at your fingertips — create goals based on previous sales and view your own progress.

As a sales professional, CRM has become an indispensable tool to do my work.  I simply love to look up a contact and instantly view all of the interactions with my customers through phone calls, emails and marketing campaigns. This not only makes my work easy, but it also gives me confidence in knowing the reality of our customer interactions. CRM saves me time in accessing relevant data, viewing my queries and generating meaningful reports in no time.