Effective in Salesforce? Marc Benioff recently stated that even after all these years, a lot of companies fail to use CRM in the right way: to keep themselves connected to their customer base. “The reality is a lot of our customers still don’t have a comprehensive customer database, their core employees are not connected in a robust way with their customers…That remains the biggest opportunity.” According to Experian, “83% of CIOs believe data is an asset that is not fully being exploited”
Connection to your prospects, partners, and customers is vital to the success of your venture. However, failure to document the outcomes of each interaction diminishes the value of that connection, leaving everyone blind to both progress and stagnation. In order to cultivate a CRM system replete with actionable insight, everything must be logged. Where are the blind spots on your customer journey and what is it costing your business?
A 2016 survey conducted by 451 Research commissioned by Blazent found “94% of respondents believed 10% or more of business value can be lost due to poor data quality” and “There is a disconnect between those persons held accountable for data quality and those that are responsible for its capture and use”
Mitigating the impact of missing data is done best by making your CRM system intuitive enough for your users to dutifully record all their activities and related outcomes. Salesforce is designed to be customized to your business, and maximizing the ROI from it requires defining and implementing all your integral processes within the platform. This is no small feat, and since your business is constantly evolving, so too should your instance. Creating processes your users will follow requires building pages they can and will complete with the precious data from their interactions. This massive undertaking starts with a ton of meetings and could potentially end with a bunch of code, but the result is a revenue engine primed for full throttle.
With all of these challenges out on the table, how are you handling the problem of poor data quality or information not being entered at all into a system? I’d love to hear how you have managed to solve these problems for your organization.
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