So, the first step towards upgrading your CRM tool needs to be spending time doing some sales process definition exercises...by defining the different sales stages, process steps, and activities that are associated with each of those steps, as well as intervals. Define the probabilities of each stage in terms of opportunity management, and then once defined, actually integrating those into your CRM tool with salesforce.com.
It's very easy to define different stages of the sales process and to teach how to customize the fields that are necessary in order to get everybody to use the system consistently. Once you do, you're able to easily establish management dashboards that give you visibility over activities, whether it be number of phone calls, number of attempts, number of connects, number of appointments, proposals, and closes through to your actual pipeline and sales forecast. You get really good visibility at what's going on at each sales territory. If your company is struggling in that area, it's easy to overcome the problem by enlisting a sales consulting firm that knows how to define sales processes and integrate them with CRM. What are you doing to improve your sales force automation in 2006?
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