CRM: A Time-Saving Tool for Positive Traction

CRM: A Time-Saving Tool for Positive Traction

Everyone has a number! That’s a key concept from The Entrepreneurial Operating System® outlined in Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business, the popular business book by Gino Wickman. These numbers are recorded in the Company Scorecard, which identifies:

  • Who is responsible?
  • What is the measurable?
  • What is the goal?
  • What is the weekly metric toward achieving that goal?

Generally, these numbers are activity-based, and not high-level numbers you see on a profit and loss statement (P&L). For example:

  • For marketing, the measurable might be:
    • The number of leads generated, or
    • The click-thru rate on an email campaign, or
    • The number of event registrants.
  • For sales, the measurable might be:
    • The number of appointments held, or
    • The number of demonstrations provided to prospects, or
    • The number of proposals sent.
  • For customer service, the measurable might be:
    • The time to resolve a case from start to finish, or
    • The average customer satisfaction score for the week, or
    • The number of cases closed.

Obviously, these are just examples. There can be a wide variety of goals, depending on your organization and its quarterly and annual plans. Deciding on the right metrics can be challenging, because you want to drive the right behaviors and avoid unintended consequences. However, once you’ve decided on your measurables, actually capturing the data can be a lot of work.

Whether your company is using spreadsheets for your Company Scorecard or the online EOS® Ninety app, you must first gather the data. That’s where a good customer relationship management (CRM) system integrated with an appropriate digital marketing automation platform can help. In fact, each of the metrics outlined above can be captured by a CRM, whether you are using Act!, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics or Zoho CRM. As long as you have the proper configurations, list views and dashboards, as well as a working integration with a digital marketing tool, you can ease the pain of tracking data in office documents and manually calculating them each week.

An effective CRM can be a huge time-saver and can eliminate many of the headaches currently created by inefficient manual processes. Given that the Company Scorecard must be completed weekly before the Level 10 (L10) meeting, an investment in good platforms and processes for gathering data can quickly have a positive return – and create goodwill with your team members currently tasked with data collection and data entry.

If you’d like to know more about using CRM to assist with gathering your key Traction metrics, please reach out to the expert team at TopLine Results. We’ve worked with a number of businesses using EOS® methodology to help them effectively capture the data they need for their Company Scorecard. You can find us online here or give us a call at +1-800-880-1960. We can’t help you put the right people in the right seats, but we can help you equip them with tools to capture their key metrics, so they can demonstrate their value and ensure your organization has positive traction!


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