Making the Most out of the current situation

The Corona virus (COVID-19) caught the world by surprise and we all are now forced to cope with the present reality. Staying at home and avoiding social contact is what the experts say, is the best way to beating the pandemic. Companies have taken the cue and are doing everything they can to avoid a grinding halt. Many of them have shifted their operations to a work-from-home setup, because, from a business standpoint, there are still opportunities to pursue and services to render. With that being said, here are some ideas to staying productive amidst the spreading global health crisis.

Re-imagine the workflow

Because of the pandemic, we now face a new normal – and that is little to no social interaction. Because of this, working from home has become more of the norm than the exception, and for sales teams used to doing field work and meeting with clients, this can come as a shock. Thankfully, CRM systems are configurable to our current predicament. With a little tinkering, these systems can be automated to send out alerts to key persons when certain situations arise – a good example would be reminders for follow-ups. Another situation that these systems can help with is when an employee falls ill; work will be delegated to other team members until they can get back, so the workflow doesn’t skip a beat.

Spring cleaning

Another drawback from working at home is it generates downtime. Flip it to become an advantage by delegating clean-up runs. Let’s face it, not everyone will be busy during these times; identify key personnel and give them database clean up tasks. This way, when everything returns to normal, you will have a lean and clean CRM machine.

No place like home

Marketers know that during these times of social distancing, customers will be turning to the Internet more than ever. If it hasn’t been done it yet, now would be the perfect time to integrate the company CRM system with the website. Integration is fairly easy (any decent CRM system – SAP, Oracle, HubSpot CRM, or Microsoft Dynamics, will already have this feature built-in) and ensures that any customer data entered into the website gets saved into the database. This is then cascaded to the right people or be integrated into the workflow. Make sure valuable data does not fall between the cracks during the next weeks. This will be key in keeping businesses moving forward.

And while we’re at it, why not integrate CRM with your business calendars and email campaigns as well? Send out bulk emails to set customers in a consistent and timely fashion. Similar with website integration, it would also be a great to incorporate CRM solutions with business productivity tools. Before the pandemic, a transition like this would disrupt your team’s workflow, but since a good number of your team members would have free time on their hands anyway, getting them all on board with this initiative would be highly beneficial in the long-term.

What we can do now is very limited, but this should not deter us from being productive. Doing so ensures a quick bounce back, post crisis. With a little effort, we will all come out of this better and stronger than before.