Maintain your Pipeline and Nurture your CRM Leads

What is the most common reason for adopting a CRM system? That’s a loaded and debatable question — there are many reasons you might get on board the CRM train, but one consistent factor is managing the relationship with your clients.

In today’s blog, we’re looking at how your CRM helps nurture Leads so they become customers, and maintain your Sales Pipeline so you stay in business. Before we start — what do we mean by nurturing leads and maintaining a pipeline?

Understanding the Importance of Your Sales Pipeline

In the CRM world, a sales pipeline refers to the potential business you and your sales team are trying to win in a particular time frame. To maintain it, you want enough potential deals lined up and moving through your process to meet your target.

Nurturing your Leads, on the other hand, is all about building the foundation of a relationship with the person you’re trying to do business with, ensuring they see the value you offer. A lead is a person who’s appeared on your radar — you qualify them, and once qualified, you can convert to an Opportunity and bring that potential deal into your pipeline.

A CRM solution plays a very specific role in a business. You’ll see it shorthanded as a tool for “organisation” or “efficiency” — in reality, a properly implemented system does so much more than that. Here are two things you must do, and two things you should consider doing, to get the most out of it.

Essential #1: Good Data In, Good Data Out

Your CRM solution is only as good as your data. This comes in two parts — firstly, the data you’re inputting. Whether you’ve prepped spreadsheets to import or are entering data manually, you want it useful, tidy and relevant: phone numbers consistently formatted, email addresses stored in the same field, that kind of thing.

But that’s just the beginning. Your data isn’t a static body of information you refer to now and again — it’s a live set of records that needs maintenance. Opportunities need to stay up to date, with the sales stage kept relevant, and every interaction with a lead recorded so you can see when you last spoke and what about.

Essential #2: Pay Attention and Stay Focused

Say you’ve completed step one, and got clean data loaded into your CRM. You now need the system to present that data to you in a useful format — so instead of a pile of Leads or Opportunities, you and your team see only what’s relevant to your role.

Pipeline Graph

One of the most useful tools in the salesperson’s box of tricks. The pipeline graph takes a snapshot of a user’s Opportunities and presents it as a graph — a quick visual indicator of performance, with fast access to the stats behind it. A good way to start the day before drilling into the jobs at hand.

Custom Views

Logging every interaction builds a complete picture of your Leads and Opportunities — but with all that data, you need the system to surface what’s relevant. Custom views are pre-saved searches with filters applied, so instead of seeing everything ever raised, you see what you’re currently working on.

From a Management Perspective

Individual salespeople are mostly concerned with their own Leads or Opportunities. As a manager, you need to see how the whole team is performing.

Reports, Automated Reports, and Dashboards

If the data is stored in your CRM, you can report on it — as a list, grouped totals, or a graph. Think about not just what data is presented, but how you need to see it. Take a look at this list of reports you may find useful. Once configured, you can set a report to show on your dashboard, or have it automatically emailed to you.

Often, a project starts with a priority list of must-haves, followed by a secondary list of nice-to-haves. If clean data and good system config are the must-haves, the following fall into the secondary category.

Optional #1: Share and Share Alike

We talked above about using views to segment data. But every business operates a little differently — for many, it’s useful for the sales team to be aware of what the others are doing. If you don’t know what someone else is doing, how do you know you aren’t duplicating the work?

Easier said than done with a competitive sales team, battling for every Lead and pouncing on every Opportunity. Setting up ground rules or permissions within your CRM can change that competition to cooperation — sharing rules that allow viewing but not editing let you control what people can do with each other’s records.

Pair this with automated round robin record assignment and you take away the need to fight with each other — the focus shifts from competing to working together.

Optional #2: Branded Communication

Businesses spend thousands building their corporate brand — logo, website, terminology, social presence. Having done that work, it’d be a shame if your team veered from the script with inconsistent, poorly designed emails. Every communication from your business should look, sound and feel the same — that’s how your customers and Leads know it’s you.

Using email, PDF and mail merge templates gets you two wins for one: your team’s job gets easier — no copying and pasting or building from scratch, just select the relevant template — and your branding stays consistent. A Lead who receives a clear, well-branded answer to a question knows they’ve been nurtured by real expertise.

I hope this has given you some ideas about maintaining your Sales Pipeline and nurturing your CRM Leads. If you’d like to chat more about how to implement OpenCRM with your team, please get in touch.