Defining Your Own CRM Best Practices Level

To get your own measure of best practices you won't need to go out and hire an expensive CRM consulting company, research and advisory firm, or get approval from your CEO to spend a huge amount of money. Instead, you can go through a series of questions here and score them below to see, at a broad or strategic level, how your company compares to industry averages.

Quick Tip:

Watch this site for additional self-scoring tests and tutorials developed to capture where your company is on best practices by strategy area, and give you valuable guidance for helping you get to your goals.

Please answer each of the questions below and count up the number of Yes answers at the end:

Questions

Yes

1. More than 10% of our leads are coming off the Internet.

2. Campaigns are measured for their contribution to sales.

3. We have programs in place for up-selling customers.

4. Our website and online tools can be personalized.

5. Does your company have all customer data centralized so all interactions are based on shared, updated and recent data?

6. We know how many leads turn into prospects, and then into sales.

7. Do you tie the use of sales software to compensation?

8. If you have a call center, the staff is trained frequently on new specials and products.

9. Your sales force, including your call center reps, has a clear set of performance measurements that are frequently checked by sales managers and posted for competition.

10. Your hiring guidelines and practices stress the ability to use CRM tools at an advanced level.

Scoring:

7 - 10 Yes answers: Your companies is well on its way to best practices, and keep coming back to this site for additional self-scoring tests and guides for maximizing performance in your CRM strategies.

5 - 7 Yes answers: Your company is most likely just starting out on a customer-facing strategy. Be sure to start indexing income to the use of sales force automation tools and changing the approach to customers by hiring sales people with skills using CRM applications.

3 - 5 Yes answers: Go back and look how you are structuring your customer strategies and look for a chance to take into account the basics above about how to create a customer-driven organization.

0 - 3 Yes answers: Your company is either just getting started or has neglected customers and selling. It's time for some major work; be sure to check out the reference area of the site and also use other diagnostic tools to get strategies moving that will connect you with your customers more efficiently.