Your Top Priority Automation

Missed Opportunities

Poor sales data means missed opportunities. You don’t know which of your prospects is closest to closing. You waste time chasing unproductive leads and making dubious revenue projections. Distrust mounts and contributes to high turnover in sales teams.

Almost 90% of firms use customer relationship management (CRM). A quarter of them say over half the data is inaccurate. Almost a third report losing at least 20% of revenue because of poor record keeping. That doesn’t include all the firms that don’t measure these metrics. The stats we do have come from Validity’s State of CRM Data Management report.

Where does the bad data come from? The chief culprit is not following up after meetings.

2020 research in the MIT Sloan Management Review concluded only half of meetings were effective. Results for remote meetings were worse. The Journal of Management Development attributes poor performance to too many people in meetings.

In 2022, the Harvard Business Review determined that there were too many meetings and that 70% of them kept employees from doing productive work.

While most firms have a CRM, the logging of calls, meetings and emails is patchy. A Forrester report notes half of sales teams underutilise the CRM. HubSpot says reps often don’t log meetings, unless it is automated through calendar sync.

Salesforce research from 2022 shows that meetings were the least likely events to be logged. They are often unstructured and require manual notes. This extra effort ensures people find a higher priority task to do instead.

Results are better in finance, pharmaceuticals and government contracts, where regulation leads to mandatory meeting records. In less regulated industries, such as construction, retail and small business services, while deals are logged, touchpoints are likely to be missing.

A rule of thumb derived from this research is that you can trust about 60% of your deal pipeline. Forecasts derived from CRM data may be 30% overstated. Not adjusting for this is the primary reason for forecasts being missed.

The Top Business Priority

It is against this backdrop that I’ve been working with a client. Its marketing team is frustrated by not knowing what happens to a lot of the qualified leads that they send to sales. The lack of information means they miss important feedback about what is working in their campaigns.

This is not because of laziness on behalf of the sales team. The business runs campaigns around external events and has no control over the deal calendar. Sales and marketing activity is either sparse or frenetic. Given the priority to close deals, the reporting of what did not work is often overlooked.

The solution is simple. The client’s CRM has in built AI capabilities and it is straightforward to connect various software using an application such as Make.com. What is missing is the time to do this.

We use AI to draft first-touch outreach to the client’s potential customers. This is personalised and compliance checked. Once approved or edited by the sales team, it is sent. The system tracks subsequent interactions and records progress of the deal in the CRM.

The responsibility to close remains with the sales team. The benefit of the AI automation is to provide feedback to marketing and management. Marketing knows which deals close and gets a breadcrumb trail from campaign message to conclusion. Management sees where deals breakdown and can refine the process to improve future results.

As part of our engagement we always review a process from start to finish. As a result, we are able to recommend additional improvements. These include automatic enriching of prospects who respond to outreach. We use internal and external databases to fill in CRM profiles. This has a direct benefit for the quality of personalised follow-up.

Thereafter, leads are ranked on the likelihood of closing. Hot leads are passed to sales, while others are routed to a nurturing sequence. This ensures that future revenue is not lost.

There are many processes at firms that may be improved through consultancy and automation. Sales workflows are the priority, because improving them boosts revenue. With at least a fifth of revenue lost to poor record-keeping, automating the cooperation between marketing and sales should be top priority for most businesses.

Questions to Ask and Answer

1. How accurate are your client records?

2. How detailed are reports of interactions with clients?

3. How often are your to-do tasks from meetings actually done?

Find out more about automating marketing and sales processes.