8 CRM Best Practices For Your Business

Imagine a football team, but with every player using their own separate playbook. No teamwork, all chaos. That’s what it feels like when your customer data lives in silos — a disjointed mess. Having a customer relationship management (CRM) platform that puts all that data in one place can have your company moving like a championship team. With these CRM best practices, you’ll work together from the same data set and better support your customers.

The average company uses over 1,000 apps to manage their business. The problem is that 70% of those apps don’t work together, according to Salesforce’s Connectivity Report.

It’s hard to deliver great customer experiences and grow relationships when you don’t have a clear view of your customer’s data and interactions across your business. Even if you have solutions for each team, these apps are often disconnected and end up creating data silos leading to disjointed customer experiences. A well-implemented CRM solves that problem, by giving everyone in your business a unified view of your customer data.

This helps because when customers contact your company, they don’t want to answer the same basic questions over and over. They just want a solution. Here are eight CRM best practices that will help you be more efficient and get the most out of your investment.

What we’ll cover:

1. Choose a CRM that fits your needs
2. Set your CRM goals
3. Make an implementation plan
4. Customize your CRM
5. Train your workforce well
6. Rely on automation and AI
7. Keep your data clean and organized
8. Focus on collaboration

Not every CRM is created equally. If you choose a CRM without properly researching its capabilities (and its weaknesses), then you might end up committed to a system that doesn’t help you with your specific goals.

Some things to consider:

Would you prefer a CRM that requires a service contract, or one that costs more upfront to install? Does your organization need in-depth, highly customizable features, or will basic functionality suffice? Will the CRM be able to scale and grow with your business, or will you need to start looking for another solution in a few years?

Take your time and weigh all of your options, and know what you need before making a final decision.

Once you’ve chosen the CRM software that works for your organization, it’s time to make sure your CRM goals are aligned with your overall business objectives. Define measurable and realistic goals for how you would like the CRM to help your teams succeed. Over time, you can track those goals and adjust them as needed.

There’s quite a lot your CRM can help you do, especially if you choose an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled CRM.

For instance, your CRM can help you improve the buyer journey — from the prospect stage, to customer acquisition and then through customer service management. Once you map out that journey in your CRM, you can track where you’re hitting your goals, and where you’re off target.

A CRM can also help you hit efficiency goals, with its ability to save time by automating tasks such as customer outreach, post-purchase followup, invoicing, and more. With the right configuration, your CRM can improve your customer acquisition and retention costs. You can even have your CRM automatically pull and send reports on a regular basis, giving you automatic updates on the metrics that are most important to you.

By setting CRM goals, you’ll be able to see how segmentation and personalization increases responses in marketing campaigns, how many more deals your sales team is closing and how much less time it takes. Your customer service department can focus on high-priority cases, as AI CRMs like Salesforce use AI agents, AI-generated knowledge base articles, and chatbots to handle minor tasks and quickly review case histories to streamline service interactions.

Before your organization starts using the CRM, you need to build an implementation strategy. This plan should include a timeline, a defined scope, the resources you’ve allocated to implementation, and metrics you’ll track.

Next, you can customize your CRM to your needs and transfer your data to this new program, making sure relevant items like customer histories, sales records, and service interactions are migrated.

Once your CRM is live and your employees are using it as directed, make sure to evaluate performance and listen to feedback from your teams.

If this process feels a bit overwhelming, you can have an implementation partner tailor your CRM to your company’s specific needs. It’s not just about setting up new accounts and passwords. An implementation partner customizes the CRM to your standards and trains your employees, designing workflows that help your business build stronger customer relationships.

Change can be hard, but the more training you can provide, the more likely it is that your employees use the CRM regularly.

A CRM can be the engine that keeps your business moving forward — but you need to tailor it to your specific workflows and processes to reap the benefits.

Your CRM can connect to other programs your teams use every day, like email, calendar, automation, and customer service tools. You can adjust the settings, create custom fields, and set up dashboards so each team has a quick and easy view of important metrics.

Customizing your CRM at the start is a CRM best practice that saves time, as your teams won’t have to dig through spreadsheets or search through disconnected systems to find the information they need to do their jobs well.

Each team will want a different setup, so it’s important to learn which metrics they want to keep a close eye on. For instance, your marketing team can set up a dashboard in CRM for a simple view of email metrics, such as open rates, click-through rates, and more. You can personalize a dashboard for your service team, so they can quickly see vital metrics like average handle time, first contact resolution or customer satisfaction scores.

CRMs like Salesforce also have the scalability and flexibility to adapt as your company grows. As time goes on, you can add or remove features based on your needs and goals. You’ll only pay for what you need.

Once you’ve got your CRM dialed in to your specifications, it’s time to make sure your employees have the proper training before they start using it. An implementation partner can help with this, providing hands-on training, documentation, walk-throughs, and case studies showing how other companies have successfully used the CRM.

Once the implementation process is complete, keep that momentum going so that using the CRM becomes second nature for your team. The last thing you’d want is for your teams to go back to spreadsheets or disconnected systems because they don’t understand the value of regularly using your CRM. After all, your CRM is only as good as the people who use it.

Make it a company policy that every new lead, without exception, be processed through the CRM. By enforcing the correct use of the CRM system as soon as it is established, you’ll be able to guarantee a smoother transition, as well as a more unified team.

With proper education and training, your teams can stay on the same page, get organized and communicate better. The CRM becomes the sole data source, unifying the company around the same information.

One of the key CRM best practices for adoption is to create a training plan, with continual learning through programs like Trailhead. An easy place to get started is this CRM course. You could also create an easy-to-use cheat sheet on the most commonly used parts of your CRM. Include CRM reviews in team status meetings, check in with individual members of your company to see how they’re adapting to the CRM, and set clear metrics and goals to track adoption, such as the percentage of people using it or projects that have been entered into the CRM.

CRMs are designed to help your business by doing a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to building your customer relationships. When you have a CRM with automation and AI baked in, you’ll see efficiency gains across the company.

Automation — a process that automatically completes tasks with minimal human input — allows your employees to get more done quickly. If your teams have workflows that they repeat day-after-day, automation can handle those tedious tasks, freeing up your employees to focus on providing the personalized care that customers expect.

For instance, your sales team can automate lead management. Once a lead is entered into the system, you can set a rule that automatically sends a follow-up email after a set amount of time so that sales opportunities don’t get lost in the shuffle. Meanwhile, the commerce team can create automations that send in-app reminders if a shopper abandons an item in their cart for a specific amount of time.

Trusted AI takes automation one step further — automatically scoring leads based on a mix of customer history and an analysis of overall consumer behavior, identifying which leads have the greatest opportunity to close or generate the most revenue. An AI CRM securely draws from your customer data to automatically surface insights like these that your marketing, sales, and service teams can use to move leads down the funnel.

We’ve found that companies saw a 30% increase in revenue after implementing an AI CRM, as well as 29% faster case resolution.

An AI CRM can provide insights based on your existing customer data. To make the most of it, you’ll want to make sure that data is clean , organized (in one place, not in separate apps), and accurate.

Data cleaning is the process of fixing or removing incorrect, corrupted, incorrectly formatted, duplicate, or incomplete data within a dataset. It’s one of the most essential CRM best practices to follow. With an AI CRM generating insights from your customer data, making sure that data is clean will help you make better decisions based on accurate information.

However, clean data can only do so much if it’s siloed in disconnected apps. A CRM breaks down those silos and gives you a single data source your whole organization can trust.

For better accuracy, you can build a process for regularly cleaning your customer data, and make sure your teams continue to audit for inaccuracies as more information is added to the CRM.

If your data isn’t organized, the insights your company operates on could be inaccurate. We found that only 35% of sales professionals completely trust the accuracy of their organization’s data. The best way to prevent this is to keep your customer data on a single data platform, giving your teams the same unified view.

If your sales reps use a different customer data platform than your service team or marketing department, you’ll have contradictory or duplicative information for the same customers. With everyone using their own system, trying to get an accurate read on your customers’ journeys can feel chaotic. This can lead to embarrassing situations like making a sales call to someone who’s already converted, following up on a service inquiry that’s already been handled, or shipping a product to the wrong destination.

You can bring it all together with a collaboration tool like Slack, helping teams easily communicate with customers and each other. After all, 80% of service agents say better access to other departments' data would improve their work.

With CRM, sales agents can easily access a customer’s purchase history, while AI can draw from your secured data to suggest compleme​​ntary purchases they can upsell. Service agents can see the record of sales interactions, knowing more about the customer instantly. Your marketing team can see how people are buying and engaging with your products, coming up with messaging that resonates.

With these CRM best practices in place, your customer relationships, and your business, can grow and flourish in new ways. Your employees will be more productive, enabling them to focus on more complex business challenges. Your customers will receive more personalized offers, recommendations, service, and attention throughout their journey. Get started by unifying your customer data into a single source will help you move your company forward.

Justin Lafferty is a writer and editor based in Las Vegas, currently coaching writers and strengthening SEO as a Senior Editor at Salesforce. He's contributed to Adweek, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the San Diego Union-Tribune, the East Bay Times, and many more outlets.