CRM Best Practices still alive

It doesn’t matter what Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software you are using, the same best practices are still alive today that drove the initial boom of CRM in the mid 90’s.   It never hurts to review these core principles and make sure they are still the foundation of your CRM strategy.
 
Centralize, centralize, centralize
You want all your company contacts in once single place. Who are your customers? Who are your prospects? Who are your business partners? You can’t manage and tracks relationships with your key contacts unless they are in a central place. Therefore the top sales person should not have them in his personal address book. The customer service department should not build their own customer database, and the marketing department should not be keeping their own spreadsheets and lists. It might be time to crack down on this hard, and bring your data together into a single CRM system.
 
Segment
Picking the key pieces of data to segment your database is a must with CRM. Making sure they are marked properly for the type of relationship they have with your company, the status of the last communication, and the goal of the next communication. Your data is worthless unless you at least have a place to record this basic information.
 
Categorize
And when contact is made with an individual, don’t throw away the value of their results. Often companies let their employees record notes however they want—often times in a giant notes field. Best practices is to schedule activities into the future, and complete those activities with categories and notes. This is critical for capturing and reporting on the types of communication, the purpose of communication, and the result of the communication that are made. This kind of data is fairly effortless to collect, but helps you analyze your sales cycle.
 
Keep the CRM best practices alive in your organization and let them be the foundation of your business success!