Every company that implements a CRM system hears a common concern “We don’t want to turn our sales staff into data entry clerks, we want them meeting with clients and prospects”. My reaction to this comment is; I couldn’t agree more! Obviously, the value of your sales team is having them meet with clients, prospects, networking contacts and other people who can drive opportunities. Having them chained to a desk entering information in a CRM system isn’t helpful. So how does Microsoft CRM address this issue? The answer has a few components.

First, let’s agree that some feedback from the sales team is necessary and they have to enter that information into some system. Whether that is Microsoft CRM, an internally developed tool or by typing an email to update everyone, some updates are necessary. The sales staff is constantly meeting with clients and prospects so they need to be the liaison to the customer. The issue we constantly see is that most of the updates are responses to ad hoc requests and “important updates for management”. How many times do you burden your sales staff with preparing a special report for an upcoming meeting? How many times do you ask for the same pipeline report in a different format to meet management’s most recent request? Whether you want to admit it or not, these efforts are turning your sales staff into data entry clerks. The same can be said for the myriad of emails that are sent between sales, marketing, executives, sales engineers and other contributors to the sales process. So again, how does Microsoft CRM address this issue?

The first answer is that Microsoft CRM provides a common database for accounts, contacts, opportunities and other important sales and marketing information. People often dismiss this as a “glorified contact management system”, but it is one of the biggest time savers that help to drive efficiency within an organization. The sales team wastes so much time looking for information, entering redundant information in systems, responding to emails, reformatting Excel spreadsheets and the list goes on and on. Microsoft CRM provides a common platform to store information and reduces the time the sales team spends entering data or responding to a request for the latest contact information for a key contact.

The second part of the answer is integration between Microsoft CRM and Outlook. As a heavy Microsoft CRM user I can speak firsthand of the time savings from the integrated environment. I spend my entire day and only use Outlook regardless of whether I am working in or out of the office and connected or not connected. Other systems claim to have an “Outlook plug-in”, but it is not true integration. I can access my entire Microsoft CRM environment from within Outlook. Furthermore, there is no exporting and importing of information, it is true integration. Allowing users to engage with a single application that they are probably already familiar with is a huge time saver.

I know this may seem like a basic topic for an application that has been around for six years, but hopefully everyone is finally beginning to realize that Microsoft CRM will reduce the administrative burden on your sales staff!