Fours Ways a CRM can Help You

Structure is Your Friend

When your employees can count on their daily, weekly, and monthly responsibilities to be structured, they’ll be more productive, more at ease, and more adaptable when issues do arise. A common tool used by successful teams is daily meetings. While many can take place in-person, when you don’t have that ability a Distribution CRM can allow you to message your employees each morning about the day’s tasks and any specifics needed. Salesforce allows you to create tasks for each day down to the smallest one, and you can message employees to discuss anything and everything. This structural layout and ability to communicate keeps things running smoothly. These rituals, like daily stand-ups, create a rhythm that makes your employees feel like they’re all working toward the same goal.

Results Don’t Lie

When you look at your results, you’ll have the facts about how successful your team is. Particularly when you don’t see each member of your team, trust in the results is crucial. As the project manager, you need to measure their work not by the hours spent there but by the results. Some business models work better for distributed teams, but you must keep in mind that a results-oriented culture is imperative. Here, you’re not focused on individual hours spent working, though you might still need to track project hours for billing and the like. Instead, you’ll be focusing on the individual results achieved and if they match up to expectations. That’s where a program like the Salesforce CRM is beneficial. Why? It’s because it allows you to track completed projects as soon as they’re done, and you can see how each completed task feeds into the next. You can look at problems slowing things down and preventing other tasks from being finished as well.

Celebrate Your Accomplishments In-Person

When you’re working on your project, it’s important to go out and celebrate large milestones as much as you can. While getting together in-person can be tricky for some, if you’re able to you truly must. If your project is about three to five months long, meeting up once or twice during the process will allow as many people to attend the events as possible. Even if some people can’t go, it’s better to host one for as many people as you can. When you’re employees are spread out across the state or even the nation, that can be difficult to plan, however, the benefits outweigh the expenses. These in-person, face to face meetings build morale, connections between employees, and foster the belief that the managers do truly can about the people working beneath them. The trick is to plan these events and set aside the funding well in advance.

Communication Made Easy

Nothing and that means nothing, can get done if we don’t communicate with each other, and that doesn’t just mean talking. That means listening, asking questions, getting answers, and understanding what each person involved in a project means when they say something and what they need to get their portion of the project done. You need each member of the team on the same page, and that needs to be constant during every step of the process. Consistent communication where questions are encouraged creates a sense of trust and adaptability. In tandem with this, you need a way to communicate that is easy for everyone and works wherever they may be. That’s where having the right distribution CRM is essential. The right software can make all the difference. With a program like the Salesforce distribution CRM, you can track email and meetings, create a custom dashboard and reports of crucial information for each employee that come with their own messaging feature, and manage the overall sales process from one easy-to-use platform.

Be the Best Distribution Team You Can

When you want to be successful, having an office that runs smoothly, even if most to all of your work is done remotely, is key. Use these tips and the software tools available to ensure you facilitate a business culture of open communication, trust, and results-driven approaches. And you can do it all with Salesforce.

Contact us now for more information about how Customer Relationship Management can help your business.