Aligning Your CRM With Your Business Goals

You are more likely to achieve your business goals by correctly aligning your CRM to those goals. But how can you align them properly?

This blog will discuss why aligning your CRM to business goals is essential and share steps to aligning your CRM system with your goals appropriately.

CRM Alignment Drives Business Goal Achievement

It is critical that you also prioritize the alignment of your CRM with long-term organizational goals. This alignment is essential for four main reasons:

Reason 1: It Gives You a Better Chance of Meeting Your Goals

When your business goals are reflected in your CRM, you will have dashboards that provide a birds-eye-view of how close you are to achieving them. When your goals are off track, you can provide resources and address setbacks, such as process or automation issues, to get your teams back on track. 

Reason 2: It Helps You Prove CRM ROI

In addition, aligning your CRM with your organizational goals is a simple way to help you prove CRM ROI.

When you have data that proves you have met organizational goals—especially goals like increased revenue or decreased costs—it will be simple to calculate and prove your CRM ROI. 

Reason 3: It Improves Interdepartmental Communication

Each department within your organization will have a hand in helping the organization meet its goals. But, unfortunately, many departments work in silos—not communicating with one another and not understanding the impact that other departments have on the organization.

Creating CRM workflows that connect various teams ensures that there is open communication between departments and that a lack of inter-departmental communication does not negatively affect goal attainment.

Reason 4: It Increases CRM User Adoption Rates

83% of executives report user adoption as being their biggest CRM-related issue. One of the main reasons users don’t adopt CRM technology is that they don’t understand how it helps them achieve their goals. When you align your CRM to your organizational goals, your end-users will have an easier time connecting the value of the CRM to their roles.

5 Steps to Aligning Your CRM and Your Business Goals

Step 1: Identify Your Key Business Goals

The best way to determine your business goals is to look at your historical data and see what goals would provide the most significant value for your organization. Then, when you have a well-implemented CRM system, you’ll have all of the information necessary to choose which goals you want to set. 

We’ll use an example goal for this blog: Increase net revenue by 10% in 2022. 

Step 2: Set Departmental Goals Based on Key Business Goals

Once you have your organizational goals set, the next step is to have each department set trickle-down goals, whose success contributes to overall business goal achievement.

Let’s think of department-specific goals that would help us increase net revenue by 10%.

Example Marketing Team Goal:

• Improve the conversion rate between marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads (SQLs) from 10% to 13% by the end of 2022

Example Sales Team Goal:

• Increase daily cold call quota from 20 calls to 25 calls starting in Q1 of 2022

Example Support Team Goal:

• Reduce customer churn rate from 8% to 6% by the end of 2022

Step 3: Create Processes That Align With Departmental Goals

You need to understand how your current processes promote or hinder goal achievement. Let’s walk through this by using the marketing team goal example from above. 

Marketing Team Goal: Improve the MQL to SQL conversion rate from 10% to 13%

One process that will significantly impact your ability to meet this goal is your lead scoring process.

To improve conversion rates, you should assess how your marketing team scores leads: 

• Is your current point system representative of how your leads actually flow through your marketing funnel? 
• If you have multiple products or services with different marketing cycles, do you have unique lead scoring processes for each?
• Is our lead scoring system already set up in our marketing automation platform?

In this stage, you will outline all of your processes and get leadership approval to implement the processes into your CRM.

Step 4: Set Up Workflows, Automations, and Dashboards in Your CRM that Align with Departmental Processes

Once you understand the departmental and organizational processes needed, you can design workflows, automations, and dashboards in your CRM that reflect those processes.

Let’s continue with our example. In step 3, we outlined the rules for moving a prospect from an MQL to and SQL. Let’s say that a prospect becomes an SQL when they hit 100 points in your lead scoring process. You need to create automation rules based on this lead level.

For example, in your marketing automation platform, you can automatically:

• Assign points to prospects based on the actions they take with your marketing materials
• Assign a prospect to a sales rep when they hit 100 points
• Push them from your marketing automation platform into your CRM when they hit 100 points
• Place them in an email nurture campaign explicitly designed for SQLs

Once you have these automations and workflows set up, your CRM will move your prospects through your marketing funnel for you.

In addition to the automations and workflows, you should have dashboards set up to help departmental heads understand how likely their teams are to reach goals and to address any issues that arise.

Step 5: Communicate Goals to Employees and Show Them How to Use the CRM Platform to Achieve Those Goals

Finally, your end-users must know how to use the workflows and automations and accurately review the dashboards. If they don’t, they are much less likely to adopt your CRM.

Plus, you need to share how using the CRM will help them save time, become more productive, and ultimately focus on specific goal attainment.

Conclusion

Aligning your CRM with your business goals is a critical step in driving CRM ROI and helping your organization meet its goals. But aligning the two is no easy task. Faye’s team of CRM consultants help organizations achieve this alignment every day. Speak with one of our team members to see how we can help you achieve your business goals.