Moves Management is not something that Development makes a priority or work on. Moves Management is an organization-wide initiative that everyone in the organization has to embrace and understand.
Being able to determine how your sales pipeline is performing throughout the year can be challenging to understand without clear and simple reporting.
We would like to encourage you to PAUSE for a moment and develop a visual representation of your sales pipeline.
Your pipeline should not only be for the fiscal year but break that bad boy down into quarters or months.
Proactive Sales
Approaching sales with a proactive approach rather than a reactive approach is where you can use technology.
Integrating technology into your sales process enables you to make real-time adjustments to your sales strategy.
In a favorite CRM software of our is Zoho CRM; where included in the CRM is a module called Forecasts that provides the entire organization performance reporting by individual solicitors and organizational role.
With the selection of the year and quarter (or monthly) you can understand the current deals in the sales pipeline and if they have been funded or the percentage of likelihood that they will be.
This type of reporting allows the entire organization to understand the current status of revenue.
Empowering sales professionals to know not only the current progress to goals but to understand where they need to focus attention and resources to close deals successfully.
Everyone runs their companies technology based on the unique business needs of the company and strategy. We wanted to offer a few suggestions on common pain points that all CRM Management professionals can use.
Listed below you will find a few tips and trick to support keep these areas maintained.
Modern CRM Design
Now that CRM’s are designed with whole organizational teams accessing the system in mind, the whole process of thinking of the desired list, submitting a request to the database administrator and waiting for that person to go through the often cumbersome process of setting up a query and then exporting that data into a usable report.
Using List Views
Sometimes a change in verbiage reflects a larger shift in functionality and this has certainly been the case in CRM’s now referring to queries as views.
I’ll review how you can look at CRM software views as a tool to support productivity with your salesforce processes.
Even if you try on the two words, you immediately sense the difference.
Queries sound scientific and serious, while views sound expansive and inviting.
It’s a shift from having to mine to extract hard to get at information to simply open the shutters to reveal what is already there in all its potential.
As designers have simplified CRM user interfaces across the board, one of the biggest changes has been the recognition that it shouldn’t take a special skill set to see data organized into subsets and lists.
Thankfully all of the cumbersome steps required in the past are no more!
They have been replaced by simple filters that can yield specific results in seconds within the same window the user is currently accessing.
These list views can then be acted upon immediately, such as sending out a mass email to a particular group, or they can be used to generate reports that can then be automatically updated.
List views can also be saved locally so users can simply click on a drop-down menu to bring up a specific filtered group.
Views are unique to each user, you can keep what is relevant for you in your particular role without cluttering up the system with a mass of views.
In addition, you can switch views between tasks so that you don’t have to pull up a report and consider it alongside what you are trying to do, the view that is most relevant to your task is simply what you choose, see, and work within.
When you are done with the task you just simply revert to the regular view.
All this leads to much more efficiency in executing tasks, running reports, sending email and social campaigns, and organizing your activities.
Want to see a list of all the leads you have not contacted in the last quarter so you can send them a quick email?
Wondering how many proposals are in the closed/won stage so you can use that information for a budget update? Just use views to give you those lists with ease.
Even the actual search criteria options have become both more refined and more broadly responsive to how different users might think to search.
For instance, you could look up all the records that “contain” a particular word within a particular field to generate a list.
The sophistication of queries remains, but with a far more intuitive process.
Queries were one of the great hindering factors in the democratization of the CRM for nontechnical users, isolating a seemingly inaccessible mountain of data and allowing only the most technical of climbers access.
The shift toward powerfully intuitive list views should not be underestimated.
One is that your whole business becomes more open, efficient, and connected because more people are actually using your CRM.
The other is that everyone is then using data to drive the key decisions and actions that empower your sales team and business goals, and that is where the real gain lies.
CRM software makes another leap – enjoy the view!
System And Record Coding (Don’t Over Do It)
As we’ve worked with dozens of companies over the years one of the first things I do is take a look at their code tables.
This truly lets me know where the business is and how organized their data is.
Trying to convince yourself that “your business is SPECIAL.” Like my second in command in my last job used to tell me
“It’s Not Always About You.”
I would love to have a conversation with anyone in business about how much of their work isn’t even supporting their sales and customer journey.
Look at your coding and how you look at the tasks your company is executing.
In some cases, companies have finally let go of work and tasks they have been performing for a year when we put their work under this kind of lens.
If you want to truly measure what your business is doing, you should be asking yourself with each activity you perform in your business “is it in related to”:
Is this one of the listed below:
- Identification
- Cultivation
- Solicitation
- Stewardship?
Managing And Tracking Data And Report Requests In Your CRM
I recently had the opportunity to stop in on a Facebook Page for CRM users and a new CRM system manager was discussing how she had an immediate report request from her boss and needed a little help.
Well after I provided the answer another user jumped on and discussed how she was making the industry more difficult for other because she did not force the person making the reporting request wait 7 days to deliver it.
I totally understand this person point of view and for a time I believed it myself.
However, as you begin to understand that the world and business do not work that way!
Business and opportunities present themselves at any time and it doesn’t come down to the need to provide structure and time for how you work.
Your right, database managers are very busy and are the superman/women for the office.
There are steps we can take to make handling the normal pace of chaos in our roles with a few proactive approaches that we cover in the video in this blog post.
A true professional in this field takes full responsibility for their role in the company, though most of the time our role is a thankless role we have to think long-term and strategically to support the needs of all areas of the business.
If you’ve been a CRM system manager at any time, you’ve experienced the situation where just a few months earlier you ask leadership if certain data points should be captured and they say “NO”.
Just to come back later and explain they need reporting on that data they asked you not to collect?
Staying organized and not letting data and reporting request slip through the crack has to be a priority when providing information for the company.
Make sure you have a logical systematic process in place for managing those requests to keep the flow of information going.
View the video below to walk through managing data requests in your CRM and how it can make the entire business more productive.
The use of third-party application has to be a strategy that your nonprofit organization has to embrace. Trying to build a custom application or purchasing huge systems from your database provider that cost tens of thousands of dollars to have can’t be part of your strategy to do more with less.
The role of automation has moved from being a luxury item within CRMs to an imperative and is one of the key ways to increase productivity throughout your organization. Thankfully a few of the CRM’s out there designed for nonprofits have made the setup and running of automation far more user-friendly and far more powerful than it has been even in the last few years. With older CRM’s automation was a cumbersome and clunky undertaking for users and it took a lot to get even basic automation running. As such, it was underutilized and typically either not set up, or only used for a few redundant processes. This stood in juxtaposition to most corporate CRM’s whose designers focused heavily on automation and recognized it as the game changer in efficiency gains that it really is. So now is a great time for your nonprofit to embrace using CRM automation as it will only be growing in relevance in the coming years. Another tangential benefit of automation is that it inspires planning. If you know what automation and workflows to put in place it is because you know how these fit into overall goals and outcomes for your organization, both internal (for example, tracking development team lead conversions) and external (for example, getting a campaign to its goal).
Automation is a functionality worth asking about in some detail if you are exploring a new CRM. Here are a few guiding questions:
- Is automation easy to set up? This is definitely something you would want to see demonstrated in a demo.
- Will automation run on social, email, chat, survey responses and support tickets – in other words, does it apply across the system?
- Can you visually see the flow of triggered actions? If it isn’t intuitive to you, it can create problems when executed.
- Does automation include real-time notifications? Will staff be alerted when someone engages on any channel (email, call, chat, survey response, support ticket, social)?
- Will your CRM suggest macros for recurring actions and workflows the system sees you repeating? Users are busy doing, and sometimes don’t realize there might be a way to automate a set of tasks; smart CRM’s will see these patterns and ask users with a prompt whether they would like to add a macro to automatically run a series of actions.
Automation is an upfront investment in set-up and mapping out of workflows and communication triggers that compliment user’s roles. But the investment is well worth it these days as it is one of the most valuable tools in helping your team keep up with its many communication channels and to free them up to focus on higher level engagements and opportunities at timely periods within a given cycle or workflow. Across your organization, automation is the key to scaling your marketing, fundraising, and other communication efforts so take the time to see what your CRM can do. Power to the user!
Want to see automation in action? Here’s a quick video to show you how to set up a basic workflow:
For more information on Nonprofit Vertical Source CRM click here.
The process of collecting data is an easy one to suggest throughout your organizations. However, the task of collecting organizing and using it to make business decisions can be a challenge. With so many activities happening throughout the organization, it can be overwhelming to try to collect it all, not to mention getting that data into the system in a healthy format.
A suggested option would be to implement tools where you can collect data from internal and external data sources, and when I say data sources I’m referring to humans. Now the human piece may sound a bit clinical, but when it comes to collecting data online you should make it that basic and logic based. In most cases it’s difficult to even collect data, so approach this strategy with an open mind knowing your providing the resource for users, and hoping the value your work and will provide their piece to the puzzle of entering their data.
A few suggestions for setting up web forms:
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Determine what fields should be required and what’s on your wish list.
- The worst thing to have is a form with 50 fields, and 45 of them are required. Your goal is to collect the most important data, and really the goal is to get any data period. Choose the critical fields set them to required, and make sure the form clearly indicates they are required.
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Don’t use the standard “Submit” button text.
- Instead of having your web form’s submit button say “Submit,” have it remind the user what it is they’re doing, like “Sign up now,” or Make a donation.
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Don’t provide a Cancel button.
- If you were buying a car and the salesperson asked you, “Are you sure you really want to get this car?” would you continue to buy the car? Probably not. Maybe you’d be hesitant; is the salesperson telling you the car isn’t a good buy, or maybe you should buy a different card?Same goes for your web forms; having a “cancel” button may make your users think twice about what they’re filling out.
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Try to not make two column forms.
- According to an eye tracking study by cxpartners, a user experience design agency, scanning down the form is preferable to scanning from left to right. It reduces the number of eye movements you need to make in order to fill out the form.
Review How Our Integrated Web Forms In Nonprofit Vertical CRM Work
When sales opportunity knocks, of course, you want to answer the door, but getting the opportunity to come a-knockin’ is always the harder part.
If you haven’t used an Opportunities Board before, this can be a great way to get your arms around all the possible engagement possibilities (sales collatoral) your organization has and centralized them all into one place.
With so many communication channels it’s easy to feel like you are having to look in multiple places to find the engagement tools you need to interface with a particular audience or campaign.
Opportunities Boards create one document for all and become the hub for your available resources and sales engagement opportunities.
We recommend storing this document somewhere in your CRM that your entire staff has access to so they can add resources as they come up or are created.
In many cases within larger organization’s different departments might have resources that staff in other areas are entirely unaware of, so this exercise really is one that sheds light and empowers all.
It is also a great net efficiency gain because instead of looking in the ten places an opportunity might be living, you just have to reference one document that links you to the sources you need for a particular outreach or initiative.
It also means you won’t miss that additional resource that you forgot was even out there.
One other big plus? You will likely realize you have more opportunities to engage leads and prospects than you thought!
The pace of technology is moving so fast and evolving in such radical ways that it might be time for your perhaps here-to-fore practice of adopting technology solutions, including your CRM, on the go to yield to a more thoughtful organizational pause for a full technology audit.
I know, the term sounds terrible and conjures images of official looking suits marching through the door and requiring their own conference room for two months only to tell you that everything you are doing is wrong.
But fear not, despite the foreboding term, the technology audit can be both informal and efficient and can offer your organization vast rewards in both productivity and cost savings as well as overall operational performance.
Traditionally, IT has been its own department and as long as the organization’s technology tools were in place and functioning, IT and senior management mainly existed in separate spheres.
As it specifically related to CRM management, there was usually a database manager or other designated IT staff that handled all the inflows, outflows, and basic troubleshooting as the gatekeeper to the CRM, and lived a bit in their own dominion.
But as the momentous increase in communication channels has evolved not only are more and more staff accessing their CRMs to manage donors and constituents, but CRM’s are housing more of the tools, functions, and integration potentials that allow organizations to keep all their communications and information organized under one roof.
This is starting to provide an alternative to the often reactive one-off product adoption that has been costly and fragmenting to many organizations just struggling to keep pace with what it actually takes to communicate across the many channels necessary to reach their entire audience be it donors, volunteers, clients, or internal staff.
A technology audit invites your organization to take a minute to bring IT staff and the executive team into the same room for a conversation about how technology can and increasingly must serve as the engine for your communications, fundraising, and operations.
CRM’s are no longer data storage libraries limited to primarily recording gift transactions, they are fast becoming dynamic, user-friendly platforms that power your outreach in everything from email and social campaigns to event planning and reporting, to project and program management; and they are the best tool for managing all of the related workflows.
Companies are increasingly finding that unless you have the right CRM as your communications hub, one that can integrate and house business critical functions all in one place, it is next to impossible to get your arms around running all your operations within the complex web of interaction necessary to sustain fundraising and communications in the current era.
So one critical piece to the technology audit is to assess whether your current CRM is equipped to take on the role of mission control and reign in the often unwieldy number of one-off apps and other business solutions that are currently keeping your ship running.
Audits often start out with an inventory and mapping of your organizational workflows to vet where your current technology solutions are meeting or not meeting the needs and goals of the organization across departments.
This information can then be used to suggest immediate shifts or actions as well as being applied to one and five-year strategic plans to identify priorities, shifts, and actions that will be necessary to create a technological environment in line with larger goals and objectives.
It also reveals whether there can be more coordinated products or integrations that might consolidate solutions and enhance efficiencies while reducing overall costs.
Staff tends to have strong thoughts and opinions about technology, and the technology audit offers a productive avenue for gathering those opinions and ideas.
This feedback can also reveal where there might be holes in training or user experience that might be inhibiting even a well-executed technology plan.
It also bridges the sometimes isolated sphere of your IT staff and elevates their role to an active one in overall organizational planning which it should be.
This is because often senior management doesn’t have a complete understanding of technology and tends to either overestimate its potential (“So can’t you just push a button and all of our emails will be sent out in a coordinated fashion for the year?”) or they underestimate it and are unaware of areas where it is being underutilized and efficiency gains or tools missed (“Um, actually yes, we can automate our entire membership life cycle.”)
Questions that usually get tabled like, “Should we integrate our accounting software with CRM?” or “Should we invest in more licenses for users in the CRM so more staff can share coordinated workflows?” also have a forum within the context of a technology audit.
This forum allows enough conversation and assessment to coalesce in order to thoughtfully inform these more significant decisions.
These can then either be acted upon with a timeline and action plan for implementation or more thoughtfully put on hold, but at least for reasons clear to all.
So why suggest that now might be prime time for your company to consider a technology audit?
Well, one reason is that you likely needed a small nudge since it is an often overlooked activity at any time.
Another is that because there are so many new options in integration and product consolidation at this current point the time has never been better to coordinate and simplify your solutions.
A third, and perhaps most significant reason is that there has never been a time when having the right technology tools and plan, poised to meet current and future needs, has been more mission-critical to companies as the communications and fundraising landscape grows ever more sophisticated.
Determining which products that you are currently using will have the ability to scale, integrate, and keep pace with this landscape and how your staff uses them will be among the most important infrastructure decisions you will make.
Decisions that will be the key in providing optimal service to and alignment with your operational and mission objectives. So if you are feeling like you don’t have your arms around operations and technology might we suggest an audit?
There’s been a lot of buzz about real-time data being one of the most valuable evolutions within the CRM software market and with good reason.
CRM’s were designed upon the premise that we could use data to drive decision making and strategy, and we have seen that bear out first with how it informed sales, and increasingly with how it can inform program and organizational direction.
My boss actually refers to our CRM as a “decision making support tool,” with the idea that any decision we make should be driven by our data, not just our gut.
I say “just,” because there will always be an important place for subjectivity and the vision of leaders that carry with them the experience of being in the field and on the personal front lines of a particular cause.
That said though, there’s nothing more elegant than when our egos can yield to include the objectivity of our data in the pursuit of realizing the most of our missions. After all, and we often forget this, data is just a way of aggregating and organizing a human response.
In this way, there is lifeblood in our analytics and having the right tools to use this powerful information to make decisions that optimize our systems will always be far from mechanistic.
What feels mechanistic to us, however, is how clunky our CRM technology has felt to use when pulling together these responses.
In the past CRM’s did not invite human interaction mainly because their very design was a bit sterile and machine-like.
As a result, they dampened the passion of users seeking to engage them as support tools to further very human pursuits.
As technology (from AI to apps) has become more user-friendly though, we are becoming more interactive than ever with our tools and design has come a long way.
We can still be left feeling disconnected and out of touch though as we gather a piece of information from one tool or other, but continue to lack a way to bring all of this information together in an integrated, real-time way, which is when information becomes it’s most valuable and gives us the most human insights.
So when we talk about real-time data, what do we mean? Let’s take an example.
Perhaps your organization has an app that tracks students who are suspended, the reasons for the suspension, and duration of absence.
No doubt knowing this information instantly is critical, but leveraging that information to make decisions depends on how integrated that app is within your larger technology landscape and that of other stakeholders.
For example, perhaps when this information is logged it sends out a notification to all teachers alerting them to the student’s change in status and asking them for follow up actions such as posting homework assignments for that student for the days missed in advance of the absence.
If your app is integrated with your CRM, you can have that incident information flow directly into your larger data pool to allow you to use reporting to track overall suspension rates week to week or year to year so you can track triggering event trends by types for example.
Perhaps you find there is an uptick in kids suspended for bullying, or perhaps more drug-related activity starts to become apparent.
This informs what interventions or changes the school might take to address suspensions overall in real-time, and if this report is automatically emailed quarterly to other community agencies it can serve to inform their perspective and potential responses.
So even in this simple example, leveraging real-time data can have both short-term and longer-term impacts within multiple areas of your organization’s sphere of influence.
We were recently working with a community foundation and had the chance to see another example of how real-time data was bringing valuable returns.
They were able not only to be on top of what their own data was telling them in real-time (thanks to their CRM and a few other well-integrated tools working together), but could compare data across their grant partners, constituents and staff, as well as across different areas of funding so that their whole community benefitted from relevant, timely reporting about what might be working or not working to achieve common goals and outcomes.
They were also able to share that data with funders as programs were being implemented allowing their stakeholders to feel connected and relevant to the work they are supporting.
This kind of active reporting encouraged continued involvement with the foundation and engaged their board members and committees in a similar way with up to date dashboards offering simple, but compelling visual presentations of current data.
Even something as a simple as a dashboard posted on your website that shows the up to the minute status of a campaign or event goal can be a significant motivator for action.
Executive teams, boards, and program directors are shifting from waiting until the budget season to look at last year’s numbers (both financial and programmatic) and coming to expect timely updates so they can make decisions and adjustments throughout the year.
Your CRM should accommodate this evolution by allowing you to set up simple automation triggers to pull and send reports or post updated dashboards on various areas of organizational activity.
For example, if it turns out a particular public health speaking engagement had low turnout for the first three times it was offered in Q1, and the feedback from event surveys suggest the need for more relevant content, or perhaps an alternative preference for program delivery medium (perhaps a webinar is easier for those with severe RA since getting to an event in person might be subject to how a participant is feeling on that particular day for example), these changes can be made as soon as the data reveals the necessary course correction.
Bottom line – if decision makers are automatically getting reports and results with real-time data, decisions can be made in a far more timely and informed fashion.
To achieve all of this, of course, you need the right tools, connected in the right ways.
Basic things like your CRM having easy to use automation and web forms that connect to your website and a survey tool that can pull data directly from or about an event or program and have it flow right into your CRM are some of the things you should consider when looking to incorporate real-time data.
Also, consider whether your financials are flowing into CRM so you can generate reports that can, for example, cross-reference program cost with program participation and send an automatic report to program directors and appropriate committee members or executive team members.
To make real-time data work for you, it has to function within an integrated experience where your CRM, website, financial software, and other mission-critical operational tools are all sharing their data.
And that experience should have flexible tools within it so you can you easily (meaning without an IT person) customize and add modules and fields to your CRM, or create a webform that captures information unique to your organization.
Of course, you should also be able to access all your tools on a mobile device so that your staff can input or pull data anywhere, anytime, and do things like engaging with someone on social as soon as a post, comment or like comes in to keep these conversations fresh, timely and authentic.
So it is good to ask whether your organization has the right technology landscape to support the valuable contributions of real-time data, and if not it’s a great guiding question to help you start to analyze what you might need or need to adjust within your technology infrastructure to make real-time data a reality.
It also means ensuring that this landscape is well-traveled among your staff, and investing the time and resources necessary to have all your staff trained on all your tools (not just having someone specialized in one or the other.)
With your tools and your people working in concert, you will start to feel how the harmony of engaged data starts to inform every decision your organization makes in support of your common vision.
So don’t let the opportunities of real-time data slip through your fingers – now is the time!