When setting out to buy your first CRM or upgrade to a more robust CRM platform, there are many things to consider.
You must, of course, be conscious of your budget and timeline, but you also need to consider if your business processes are mature enough. Process maturity comes from having defined, repeatable, and measurable processes documented for internal and external use.
This blog will detail why defining and following processes is essential for your marketing, sales, support, and finance teams.
Marketing Process Maturity:
Having mature marketing processes is critical for marketing enablement.
Well-defined marketing processes ensure that your marketing team reaches the right people, at the right time, through the proper channels. Without marketing processes to follow, your marketers could make decisions based on feelings rather than facts, best practices, or data.
One undeniable marketing process that all B2B organizations should outline is a lead scoring process. This helps marketers understand when to turn a lead over to sales and helps the sales team understand which leads are most likely to convert.
You will improve marketing ROI and gather more qualified leads if the entire team follows repeatable processes.
Sales Process Maturity:
Having mature sales processes is critical for sales enablement. Your sales reps will save time and sell more when the entire sales organization follows the same processes. In fact, a study by Harvard Business Review showed that businesses with standardized sales processes see up to a 28% increase in revenue compared to those that do not.
Utilizing sales territories is an excellent example of a sales process. Your sales leadership team must develop sales territories and create automations in your CRM software to automatically route new leads to specific sales reps based on territory. This ensures no lead goes without immediate follow-up.
Moving a sale through the pipeline requires a lot of multitasking. Having defined processes ensures your reps fulfill their jobs correctly and understand exactly what they are responsible for.
Support / Service Process Maturity:
Having mature support processes is critical for guiding support reps to make the correct decisions. When all reps follow the same, well-defined processes, the customer support experience will be easier and quicker—leading to more renewals and less customer churn.
One great example of a customer support process is having clearly defined support tiers and using them for case prioritization. Once that process is in place, you can create automations in your CRM system to automatically prioritize and route cases to support agents.
Finance Process Maturity:
Outlining and following finance processes directly impacts organizational growth, and leads to improved efficiency, increased compliance, and more transparency across the entire organization.
For example, your finance team should outline processes for how department leaders submit requests for budget increases or how employees submit reimbursement requests. When these processes are outlined ahead of time, it is easier to manage expectations and timelines.
Conclusion
Although it may seem tedious, having well-defined processes across your organization will help keep everyone on track to meeting their goals.
Process optimization goes hand-in-hand with CRM. When you have well-thought-out processes, you can automate a multitude of tasks and put hours of productivity back into your employees’ day.
Curious to see if your organization’s processes are mature and ready to drive CRM workflows and automations? Download our free Process Maturity Self-Assessment.
