Setting Goals for CRM team
December 7, 2020 6:32 AM Subscribe
My boss has asked me (the CRM administrator) to come up with some departmental goals for for the CRM team for next year. I need some ideas. Difficulty: my company doesn’t own the CRM, and I have no control over creating processes, modifying layout, adding fields, etc.
The CRM is owned by our parent company, and a number of sub-companies are required to use it. They are the ultimate administrators of the system (I am the admin at the sub-company level.) The parent company focuses on their own objectives, naturally. The sub-companies mostly get what we get. We can request a field to be added here and there and they will accommodate if they can, but generally we can’t get anything fancy. The sub-companies each have their own processes which are not standardized among us, so the parent company has to be mindful of that when making changes, to make sure a change that benefits one sub-company doesn’t cause an issue for others. This creates something of a barrier to adding new processes that would flow through the CRM, although we’ve done it in the past with workarounds to the limits that are in place.
That said, here are some details about what we do at the sub-company level:
All our sales users enter their opportunities and follow them through a sales process under the guidance of their sales manager. The CRM team enters a certain type of leads for the sales reps, which they need to convert to opportunities and follow up on. Opportunities and leads need to be kept up to date, and closed in a timely fashion (whether won or lost.) There is an “activities” component (tasks, appointments, call logging) that the sales reps are not required to use, so most don’t. They use Outlook for calendar stuff. User adoption is pretty good as they can’t get around the system if they want to place an order, and there has been a lot of emphasis on pipeline accuracy over the past few months from the parent company. They recently got the dashboards component working, so the sales reps and sales managers have taken a more active role in managing their overdue opportunities and leads. However, since this is new to them I still send out a monthly overdue report to remind them to update these items.
Here are some details about the CRM department and what we currently do:
I am the CRM administrator, and I supervise two people (one officially, and one from another department who has some time to spare) who work part-time on CRM and the rest of the time working on other responsibilities. Each has a few hours a week to devote to CRM. They validate new account information, assist with user support requests, and have some availability to work on projects. One helps me with entering new leads a day or two a week.
My own duties include:
Requesting users to be set up or inactivated.
Training new users.
User support.
Creating training materials and user guides.
Communicating with the user base regarding changes, issues and process compliance issues in CRM.
Creating and running various reports, as requested by other departments or upper management. Working to ensure customer data integrity.
Entering leads which come into an email box.
Processing a lead report once a month to calculate payouts to the people (employees) who submitted the lead.
Officially supervising the one employee, which has become a challenge as she took on new responsibilities from other departments last year so I don’t have as much insight as to what she is working on and what she does or doesn't have time to take on.
Training the other employee to take on some of my department’s overflow work.
So that brings me to the goal setting. My previous boss was a marketing professional who oversaw the CRM from that perspective. She always had plenty of goals and plans for CRM so I didn’t really have to come up with much. Unfortunately she left the company at the end of 2019, and the company divided up the marketing team between the remaining upper management members. My current boss wears a lot of hats, and while she has understanding of the CRM and its uses, she now wants me to come up with departmental goals on my own. I’m having a hard time coming up with ideas, due to the restraints on creating new processes or improvements, because we are so limited in what we can actually modify in the CRM itself. And also I’m sure there are many things I don’t understand about getting value from the CRM, as I haven’t really had to think about it before beyond the level of implementing the projects my previous boss assigned.
So far the only goals I have are wanting to learn pivot tables and v-lookups to get more out of my reports. But the boss is looking for goals beyond “I want to learn X”.
Any suggestions for goals for myself and my team? Also any good resources on getting value from a CRM would be useful.
The CRM is owned by our parent company, and a number of sub-companies are required to use it. They are the ultimate administrators of the system (I am the admin at the sub-company level.) The parent company focuses on their own objectives, naturally. The sub-companies mostly get what we get. We can request a field to be added here and there and they will accommodate if they can, but generally we can’t get anything fancy. The sub-companies each have their own processes which are not standardized among us, so the parent company has to be mindful of that when making changes, to make sure a change that benefits one sub-company doesn’t cause an issue for others. This creates something of a barrier to adding new processes that would flow through the CRM, although we’ve done it in the past with workarounds to the limits that are in place.
That said, here are some details about what we do at the sub-company level:
All our sales users enter their opportunities and follow them through a sales process under the guidance of their sales manager. The CRM team enters a certain type of leads for the sales reps, which they need to convert to opportunities and follow up on. Opportunities and leads need to be kept up to date, and closed in a timely fashion (whether won or lost.) There is an “activities” component (tasks, appointments, call logging) that the sales reps are not required to use, so most don’t. They use Outlook for calendar stuff. User adoption is pretty good as they can’t get around the system if they want to place an order, and there has been a lot of emphasis on pipeline accuracy over the past few months from the parent company. They recently got the dashboards component working, so the sales reps and sales managers have taken a more active role in managing their overdue opportunities and leads. However, since this is new to them I still send out a monthly overdue report to remind them to update these items.
Here are some details about the CRM department and what we currently do:
I am the CRM administrator, and I supervise two people (one officially, and one from another department who has some time to spare) who work part-time on CRM and the rest of the time working on other responsibilities. Each has a few hours a week to devote to CRM. They validate new account information, assist with user support requests, and have some availability to work on projects. One helps me with entering new leads a day or two a week.
My own duties include:
Requesting users to be set up or inactivated.
Training new users.
User support.
Creating training materials and user guides.
Communicating with the user base regarding changes, issues and process compliance issues in CRM.
Creating and running various reports, as requested by other departments or upper management. Working to ensure customer data integrity.
Entering leads which come into an email box.
Processing a lead report once a month to calculate payouts to the people (employees) who submitted the lead.
Officially supervising the one employee, which has become a challenge as she took on new responsibilities from other departments last year so I don’t have as much insight as to what she is working on and what she does or doesn't have time to take on.
Training the other employee to take on some of my department’s overflow work.
So that brings me to the goal setting. My previous boss was a marketing professional who oversaw the CRM from that perspective. She always had plenty of goals and plans for CRM so I didn’t really have to come up with much. Unfortunately she left the company at the end of 2019, and the company divided up the marketing team between the remaining upper management members. My current boss wears a lot of hats, and while she has understanding of the CRM and its uses, she now wants me to come up with departmental goals on my own. I’m having a hard time coming up with ideas, due to the restraints on creating new processes or improvements, because we are so limited in what we can actually modify in the CRM itself. And also I’m sure there are many things I don’t understand about getting value from the CRM, as I haven’t really had to think about it before beyond the level of implementing the projects my previous boss assigned.
So far the only goals I have are wanting to learn pivot tables and v-lookups to get more out of my reports. But the boss is looking for goals beyond “I want to learn X”.
Any suggestions for goals for myself and my team? Also any good resources on getting value from a CRM would be useful.
One way to create goals is to take the things you already know you ought to do and make a business case for them. For instance, you'd like to know more about what your supervisee is working on. Is that "improve coordination between departments" or "improve processes for documenting work allocations"? How would learning more about pivot tables make your reports more useful to the people who read them? How will training the new helper make your department function better?
posted by yarntheory at 9:18 AM on December 7, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by yarntheory at 9:18 AM on December 7, 2020 [1 favorite]
What about a data cleanup goal? There's always data in the system that is old and inaccurate.
posted by nkknkk at 9:45 AM on December 7, 2020
posted by nkknkk at 9:45 AM on December 7, 2020
To come up with a process or a way to coordinate changes with other subcompanies so that when you want a new feature it has already been discussed or reviewed by the other units using the CRM software.
posted by AugustWest at 11:31 AM on December 7, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by AugustWest at 11:31 AM on December 7, 2020 [1 favorite]
Seconding data cleanup as a good goal. Can you reuse/update any of the goals your old boss created?
posted by entropyiswinning at 11:56 AM on December 7, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by entropyiswinning at 11:56 AM on December 7, 2020 [1 favorite]
Can you reach out to the current marketing lead (even if not your current boss) and ask what she would like to see from the CRM in the coming year? And maybe, following emjaybee's lead above, improving your own understanding of the company's marketing strategy/how it integrates with CRM could be one of your personal goals for 2021. Get included in relevant marketing & sales team meetings, if you're not already.
For the tasks you're already doing, are there any that are easily quantifiable and that you'd like to improve? E.g. turnaround time for lead input. You don't even have to improve necessarily if you're not yet tracking - this year's goal can be "consistently track turnaround time, with aim to achieve [whatever you're likely already achieving]."
Another approach for internal systems strategy setting is to go to your users and do a quick survey/focus group to understand any UI/UX changes they'd like, with the understanding that your hands aren't entirely free to make changes. If they come up with good ideas, you can join forces with your counterparts at the other sub-companies to make the case at the parent level.
posted by scyllary at 2:44 PM on December 7, 2020 [1 favorite]
For the tasks you're already doing, are there any that are easily quantifiable and that you'd like to improve? E.g. turnaround time for lead input. You don't even have to improve necessarily if you're not yet tracking - this year's goal can be "consistently track turnaround time, with aim to achieve [whatever you're likely already achieving]."
Another approach for internal systems strategy setting is to go to your users and do a quick survey/focus group to understand any UI/UX changes they'd like, with the understanding that your hands aren't entirely free to make changes. If they come up with good ideas, you can join forces with your counterparts at the other sub-companies to make the case at the parent level.
posted by scyllary at 2:44 PM on December 7, 2020 [1 favorite]
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For you personally, maybe interviewing some people who can help you understand your CRM's applications?
posted by emjaybee at 6:57 AM on December 7, 2020 [4 favorites]