Chances are, managing your CRM is only a part of your broad swath of responsibilities. Despite your expertise, sometimes you find yourself in a sticky situation without the ‘undo’ button…
It’s not difficult to arrive there, and it’s not that uncommon either. So dust yourself off and take a few notes from our list below to avoid the next potential professional quicksand moment:
1. You’re too busy to keep up with the latest industry and CRM trends
This is a big one. CRM systems have frequent update releases, and it’s Murphy’s Law that you miss those updates most relevant to how you leverage your CRM. Essentially, you’re stuck doing things the hard way.
Here’s where you should be able to leverage your Marketing Automation Support Partner. MRM is figuratively, and quite literally, connected to almost all of the Marketing Technology (MarTech) providers out there. Our Yetis are constantly researching better and more efficient ways to get all the marketing stuff done. CRM is only part of your responsibility, but it’s our life’s work! We’re in the tools every day, and in some cases, we’re even working with the MarTech companies directly to develop and test new ideas.
You can be sure your MRM support team is fluent in marketing automation; we even publish some of the latest and greatest updates we’ve found.
2. New apps don’t function as they should, or the synchronization is off
We’ll take that a step further: maybe you have lots of apps with some of them duplicating tasks. The best fix here is an MRM tech stack review. You could focus on one app and one synchronization, but then you’ll never know about the rest of your configuration. More often than not, we’ll gain a great understanding of how you want your setup to function, can recommend the optimized way for achieving that, and can highlight apps or software that you could downgrade or even eliminate to save costs too. You end up with an efficiently running system at a reduced cost.
3. Sending emails to contacts who’ve unsubscribed or not opted in
This is a serious one. If you’re communicating with contacts in the European Union where there is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), or one of the other countries with similar privacy laws in place, and you don’t have a robust GDPR adherence practice for your communications, you could be opening your organization up to very severe fines up to around $22 million, yes, ‘million’!!
While such laws don’t yet exist in the USA, you may want to anticipate something similar and get prepared for it for your outgoing communication process.
At MRM, we’ve implemented communication safeguards that sit on top of those already in place in our MarTech systems, and it’s a cost-effective solution to avoid a potentially devastating fine. Please contact us if this is something you’re not sure you have in place yet.
4. Constantly spilling coffee and crumbs on your lap
After that last one, we thought you might need some light relief. Nevertheless, this is a problem, especially on Fridays when Gerald brings in donuts. (Thanks, Gerald.)
So repurpose this beard bib as a coffee catcher and stick the suction cups to your screen. Coffee stains be gone! Bonus: no more snack crumbs on your keyboard either.
5. Deleting all contacts, accounts, and opportunities
So, this isn’t something you’ve done because, you know, you would never do a thing like this. But it’s something that has either happened in the past or that you never want to see happen in the future. The solution here is to implement the right User Roles and Access Rights.
Our time supporting hundreds of companies just like yours has given us great insight into user roles and access rights that make sense, protect your data, and limit different users’ abilities to make adjustments, pull reports, or download data. Data security, peace of mind…
6. Turning off (or on) important workflows
Consequences could be minor, maybe a contact doesn’t get a welcome email for example, or major, a business development rep doesn’t get the notice to follow up on a hot lead for a huge piece of business… Either way, it’s worth protecting who has access to what.
Part of the solution is to establish the right User Roles and Access Rights as we mentioned earlier, but we can also train your team on best-practice quality assurance processes so that everyone knows which buttons to push…and which ones not to.
7. Setting the MQL scoring threshold to 1 and MQL everyone in the database. Bonus if there’s an automated notification to the Sales team for every record that MQLs!!
There are some general definitions around what constitutes a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) and a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL), but maybe you have your own unique definitions. So one of the first things we do is work with you to define those criteria. We impart our experience from the hundreds of implementations we’ve already completed and help you define what will work best for your company.
Once established, we can help you, or build for you, MQL and SQL processes that align with your objectives. We leverage our broad knowledge of lead scoring mechanisms to help implement the right model to ensure highly qualified leads reach the Sales team quickly, increasing the velocity of your pipeline.
At the end of the day, managing the CRM system is probably just a part of your role. Leverage the MRM Yetis and allow us to make it one of the most rewarding parts of your role. Contact us today!
