As a continuation from our Top Five Tips for Working from Home blog, here is our second part of the series – our top tips for managing a remote team for our clients who use Maximizer CRM.
With more and more businesses having their staff work from home and joining what Time has called ‘the world’s largest work-from-home experiment‘, being able to effectively manage your team is a must. With Maximizer CRM, you have the tools to do just that.
Communicate, communicate, communicate
Employees who aren’t familiar with working from home may feel cut off from the resources, information or relationships they need to do their jobs well, so plan for more conference calls. It’s ok to pad socialising into the timeframe, it may even be vital for people who need lots of interaction to keep their energy up.
Use your Maximizer to schedule catch-up calls and team meetings in the calendar, by inviting all relevant team members this will place the meetings in everyone’s calendars.
It is essential to book these catch-ups as it will help people feel less isolated, keep them focused on their work and allow you, the manager, to get a grasp on how people are feeling and dealing with working from home.
Maximizer Dashboards
Every CRM system worth its salt will give you access to up-to-the-minute information on the customers, prospects, deals and issues. Ideally, this information will be presented in the form of a dashboard.
Using dashboards, you should be tracking three key indicators:
- Warnings – Overdue opportunities, overdue customer service cases, outstanding tasks. All of these could be represented by big red flashing lights or numbers. Make sure these shouts and scream at you. You don’t want to have to plough through a long list of figures to find the important ones. So, while everyone is on top of their list of things to do and business to chase down, your managers dashboard should be feeding you alerts that make sure nothing gets missed if team members are not available.
- Information – Progress towards a target, for each person, or team. Consider displaying variance figure – but then drill down to see what needs to change. Do your team have too many tasks to keep on top of them all? If you see a wide variance this may show things have not been updated recently. Is one of your team struggling? Remember early intervention is key when managing home workers.
- Reporter – This is the handy table of information that you rely on to guide the business. Top 10 opportunities scheduled to close this month, showing the client and the salesperson, and the date they last interacted. Or a graph showing numbers of activities by user. Is your team still picking up the phone and speaking to clients and prospects. Some may take isolation to far, and stop communicating building a sense of personal isolation, and letting clients think you don’t care.
If you want to find out more about Maximizer dashboards and how they can help, you can read our Technical Consultant, Dan Couldridge’s blog here.
Top 10 Ways Maximizer CRM helps you work from home:
Beyond dashboards and alerts, Maximizer CRM provides tools that help either reduce the workload or make it easier to accomplish. In no particular order here are the top 10 ways that Maximizer CRM helps:
- Simple email personalisation for marketing communications
- Instant re-use of data – enter once use many times.
- Reduction or elimination of time spent writing reports.
- Reduction or elimination of time spent preparing sales forecasts
- Reduction in time wasted on misdirected calls
- Increase in customer loyalty
- Reduction in customer churn
- Increase in upselling and cross-selling
- Reduction in “time to fix” for customer service issues
- Improved cash flow
If you want to find out more about how CRM and Maximizer, feel free to get in touch with our team and we will help you in any way that we can.
