Your CRM is Only Part of the Productivity Formula
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions are one of the most powerful tools in any company’s arsenal, allowing teams to seamlessly store and access valuable customer information that helps employees develop more meaningful relationships with customers, and ultimately sell and service smarter and more efficiently. Modern cloud-based CRMs can also be easily integrated with the rest of your business tech stack, adding to its versatility and ensuring data retention and consistency across the board.
Whether it’s emails, phone calls, conference calls, or other meetings, every interaction you have with customers should be housed in your CRM, allowing employees to use customer records as a reference for past interactions with your brand, purchasing history, and more. This information is critical to forming an accurate picture of customers and can go a long way in deducing a customer’s values, needs and wants. The more data your sales team has access to, the better they’ll be able to address customer pain points, identify new opportunities, and sell more capably.
They’re often used to help your employees work more efficiently, too. Processes can be automated to ensure that new leads are properly sorted and assigned to salespeople, and follow-ups are sent to leads automatically. In short, CRM solutions allow your salespeople to work more productively by putting critical information right in front of them and eliminating time-consuming processes. With the sheer versatility of modern CRM solutions, they’ve become a fairly reliable measure of employee productivity and efficiency - but they aren’t giving you the full productivity picture.
First, be confident your team is using your CRM and other tools
Your business has made a significant investment in your tech stack for a reason - it is supposed to help your employees do their jobs better. But sometimes, employees don’t use the tools they are given which can lead to inefficiency and misunderstandings. There are a number of reasons employees don’t adopt certain solutions, and it isn’t always a resistance to change. It may be that they feel they don’t know the tool well enough and will mess something up. It may be that they don’t think their department needs to use it. Prodoscore will help you identify employees who may not be using your CRM or other solutions, which can help you coach them to do the right thing and find out if they need more training or direction. Additionally, employees knowing that a tool such as Prodoscore is being used can encourage adoption on its own.
CRMs leave a major productivity blind-spot
While your CRM is one of the most important pieces of the productivity puzzle, these solutions lack the features needed to really give you a full view of how your sales teams and other employees are performing on a day-to-day basis. Since these solutions only take directly client-facing activities into account, you end up missing a major piece of the productivity picture. Your sales staff doesn’t spend the entire day selling or interacting with leads - there are many other things, both measurable and intangible, that occupy much of their time. Without any data on other tasks being performed by your employees, you’re completely left in the dark regarding their true productivity and output.
Not every activity performed or overseen by your employees is client-facing - crucial things like conducting research, working in spreadsheets, writing proposals and other important business documents, and communicating with colleagues, teams, and partners are done by your team every single day. All of these activities take place in the blindspots of even the most savvy CRM solution. That means data from popular workplace tools like G Suite, Microsoft Office 365, Slack, Zoom, Dropbox, and others are unaccounted for.
Think about how much time you spend working with a solution like Google Docs or Microsoft Excel - now think about how bad it would make you look if your productivity was only being measured by how much time you spent selling or interfacing with clients. Without data that takes these processes into account, you’ll never get a complete picture of employee productivity.
Business insights are the key to full visibility into employee productivity
With so many other tools, apps, and solutions at your disposal, it’s not enough to rely on the data being gathered by your CRM. The only way to complete the productivity formula and get the full picture of employee productivity is by using intelligent business insights. Business insights offer a real-time look at the productivity of individual employees and entire teams, showing you how each stacks up, allowing you to address productivity issues and unlock previously unseen opportunities for improvement.
Business insights provided by Prodoscore use near real-time data from your entire tech stack to give you a full picture of employee productivity - from CRM solutions like Salesforce, Zoho CRM, SugarCRM, Copper, and Hubspot to office productivity suites like G Suite and Office 365 and communications tools including RingCentral, Vonage, and Nextiva, you can be sure that nothing is being missed. Once data has been gathered from your workplace solutions, each employee is given an easy-to-understand daily Productivity Score™.
This Productivity Score™ makes it easy to compare employees and teams, allowing you to identify top performers and employees who may be experiencing stress that is interfering with their productivity, at risk of burnout, or simply require additional training. With productivity scores at your disposal, you can focus your attention on those who need it most, making it easier than ever before to replicate top employees, enhance coaching strategies, and improve employee retention by addressing problems head-on.
Having the ability to step in and assist employees in need proactively lets you build trust across your teams, showing employees that you’re dedicated to seeing them succeed in their role. You’ll also be better prepared to accurately predict and improve revenue results by using business insights offered by Prodoscore, and even strengthen the adoption of cloud tools by ensuring that all employees are using them as required.
In order to get a complete picture of employee productivity, you need more than just a CRM solution. Without having instant access to real-time business insights, you’re missing out on crucial processes and tasks that your salespeople complete each and every day, and ultimately not getting anywhere near an accurate representation of employee productivity.
