Guest Post by Brian Gardner
Founder & Lead Evangelist at SalesProcess360

I’ve found through my talks at different meetings typically 70-80% of those in attendance are using some type of CRM within their company. And that only 10% feel they are getting ROI out of their CRM. One of the factors that lead to success is setting the stage for WHY from the beginning…including getting management buy in.

Visibility is a key component in showing “why” you’ve chosen a CRM. Think about this…we all have visibility of the back end of our sales, via the ERP we are using to quote and process our orders. BUT, do we have visibility on the Front-End?

This is where the CRM tool comes in to play and it is huge in helping to manage visibility of our leads and opportunities. One of the tools within a CRM is your dashboards and these offer outstanding visibility and help support “why” with your sales team!

In my experience CRM success and visibility comes from creating a dashboard that is your leading indicator and promoting this to your sales team as such.

How are you managing your business?

How do you know if you are reaching your sales goals?

Most companies will answer, the back-end bookings and order history data. That’s good…keep doing it, but within CRM we can create what I call Load Input Goals.

That’s where we’ll set up a formula to determine what kind of input do you need to reach your sales goals. There is a formula that I use and we can imbed that into the CRM and set up a dashboard to view that.

Click link to read the complete article by Brian Gardner with details on how to set your sales team for success by creating a dashboard to monitor your Load Input Goals.

Brian Gardner is a noted industry speaker and will be a guest speaker at Tribute, Inc.'s user's group meeting, TribNet, in June. SalesProcess360 is a coaching and consulting company focused on helping industrial sales companies gain a competitive edge by leveraging process and technology. Brian Gardner has been involved in industrial sales for over 30 years and started SalesProcess360 to take his passion for sales process improvements to the industrial sales world.