By guest blogger, Arlene Welty who is the Principal Consultant at Dataquest who help customers make better business decisions by surfacing the right data within Sage 300 ERP and Sage CRM. 

If you complain that you’re “drowning in email”, you might, regrettably, be suffering from email dependency. When you let your Inbox decide what you’re doing that day, you’re not building anything. You’re just reacting – you’re volleying to get the ball back to the other side of the net. It’s not strategic, it’s reactive.

Unlike money, time is our non-renewable resource. To honour that sombre thought, we’ve got to be more strategic about the way we spend the day. I posit that, to feel satisfied at the end of the day, you need to have some intention around how it *should* be spent.

This is where I believe CRM comes in. Using CRM is a method to embed organizational goals into everyday activities. For example, successful organizations review their strategic plan and construct CRM goals  around that plan. One suggestion is to connect annual organizational sales goals with Opportunity tracking in CRM.

When we know how many opportunities, we need in the pipeline in order to win one, it’s simple to see whether we’ve got a sufficient number or not. Using CRM as the ‘to-do’ list makes organizational work concrete.

In this example, the organization transitions from using the Inbox as a to-do list, to using CRM’s opportunity list as the to-do list. Unfortunately, sometimes email dependency is part of the organizational culture. Here’s where there are even larger gains to transitioning to CRM.

• Company-wide communication runs more smoothly.
• Instead of sending emails to find out when we last spoke with a lead, just check CRM.
• When we’ve all got a central place to rely on, we’re all up to date.
• It’s wise to base team reporting on what’s logged in CRM. If the data’s not there, it’s not counted toward the sales goals and is not honoured as valid. Yes, this takes a certain ruthlessness. But it encourages people to look less at email and more at organizational goals on a daily basis.

To summarise, when people are looking at an opportunity list in CRM first thing in the morning instead of opening Outlook, we’re heading in the right direction.

This article was originally written for The CRM Connect Magazine