Create a Uniform Workflow Standard:

Customer Relationship Management

Customer Relationship Management (Photo credit: Gari)

Create a Uniform Workflow Standard:

CRM And Company Wide Sales Policies

by  Eliteseo4u

Business that wish to create a uniform workflow can find a CRM solution to their problems.

Keeping all employees on the same page and enforcing a workflow standard can be a nightmare for a growing company.  As the number of employee’s increases, managers and business owners are not able to spend as much time overseeing the work of their employees as they could when the company was smaller and some little things begin to fall through the cracks.  Over time the little issues can become bigger issues until the company reaches a critical point.  Without oversight employee standards begin to drop and the company can find itself in serious trouble.  A CRM system can provide workflow solutions that enforce a uniform work standard.

Why is a uniform standard important?

Uniform standards ensure that employees are all using the same process when dealing with customers.  The process makes sure that employees follow company approved steps and that all sales team members file the same reports for each sales call or meeting.  This reduces the number of variations in reports, and allows management to focus on the data.  One of the standards protocols that many companies use is the approval of all contract proposals over a preset dollar amount before the proposal is sent to the customer.  Without a system in place to make sure that employees are following the company’s guidelines, employees can get lazy and not seek contract approvals.  This can lead to problems when a customer is quoted a price that is lower than the company can afford, and if the customer approves a contract only to have that contract revoked by the company at a later date, the customer may choose to find another vendor.

How does CRM enforce the uniform standard?

CRM enforces the uniform standard through a guided pipeline approach to sales.  The guided pipeline has checkpoints that employees must meet before moving on.  At every step of the sales process team members are required to update the status of the job.  In the situation requiring approval for contracts, when the salesperson changes the status to “In Negotiations”, the CRM system can refuse to allow any more movement in the pipeline until a manager has updated the contract status as “Approved” in the CRM system.  This keeps management informed about the status of customer interactions at critical points in the sales process.

Doesn’t CRM limit creativity?

By forcing the sales team to adopt a uniform sales process it may seem that creativity is being stifled, but the reality is that workers are being more productive.  A uniform standard creates a set of easy to follow guidelines that are the same for every sale, so that employees know how to progress through the sales pipeline in the most efficient way possible.  With the guided process, employees waste much less time trying to remember what they have already done for the customer in the sales pipeline and what the next step might be; all of those decisions have already been scripted.

CRM solutions can help generate better sales leads and increase revenue, but there are other benefits as well.  Using a CRM platform to create a guided workflow standard for a company’s employees allows the employees to be more productive and more efficient.

My name is Elington Brown and I work with a CRM solution on a daily basis.  I feel qualified to write this article, because I control the CRM system for our company and that is all I do and have done for 5 years now. I hope this helps everyone who reads it.  Thanks for readi

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