To all those who think that CRM indicators are useless, we will answer that it is probably because they lack awareness on this subject. It is therefore high time to put an end to this urban legend and give CRM indicators a new lease of life.
Discover how CRM indicators can become the best allies of your teams' business performance and serve your business strategy.
CRM indicators and alerts: what are they?
A CRM indicator is an aggregate of mainly commercial data that provides information on a situation at a given time T. There are different types of commercial indicators: quantitative, qualitative, global, specific, business, generic and/or customized.
CRM alerts, on the other hand, are systems that make it possible to detect an "error" or an abnormal situation on data, and therefore on reality. They thus contribute to ensuring good data quality.
CRM indicators: a waste of time?
This is one of the main arguments put forward when the question of trade indicators is discussed: wasting time understanding what to enter to feed them, filling in too much information, or reading it easily... Especially if you have had the "good idea" to create a good hundred of them!
In short, you will have understood that the implementation of commercial indicators is a real reflection on the individual and collective needs of your commercial teams, but also on the necessary quality and integrity of data.
CRM indicators: is it just a pretty look?
To be useful, an indicator must be easily understood by all those who are supposed to read it. It is based on a "common definition" and must be understandable at a glance. But above all, it must serve the real needs of the user, which are relevant to them:
- of the measurement of results at a time T,
- team supervision,
- or the more global management of commercial activity and related services.
CRM indicators: is it unreliable?
A KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is based on data. As a result, data that is missing or filled out "in a hurry" by your sales representatives will distort your indicators. In this case, it is indeed preferable not to have indicators, rather than to make strategic decisions based on information that does not reflect reality.
So focus on quality rather than quantity!
CRM alerts: monitoring tools?
So yes, the very principle of an alert is to inform about a non-compliant data, or even to report a dysfunction to the hierarchy... We could therefore deduce that it is a coping tool and see the glass half empty... But the CRM alert is also there to not forget anything. We are not machines, we can forget to note information or actions... and therefore distort the indicators, as we have said above. Because forgetting and mistakes are inevitable, alerts are a necessity.
You will have understood: the implementation of high-performance CRM indicators is not so easy and requires serious work. But which serious sales manager could do without it? Because as Niels Bohr (quantum physics theorist, Nobel Prize winner in 1922) said: "What cannot be measured does not exist".
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