If you travel by car to a city in Europe, you’re likely to find yourself navigating an intricate maze of twisting roads. You could try to find tourist attractions based on your instincts, but you’re likely to get turned around and lose your sense of direction.

Today, there’s a better option: GPS. Tell it your location and where you want to go, and it will guide you there step by step. You’ll get where you want to go quickly and directly, without making wrong turns along the way. 

Just as GPS has made travel more efficient, CRM has done the same for business. What separates the stars from the bit players is that they use CRM systems and at-a-glance dashboards to help steer their business’s course. CRM systems are the GPS of the business world, moving you efficiently to where you want to go.

What do CRM systems track? Think about the questions you ask almost every day — these will provide insights on the dashboards you need to build.

1. How’s Your Marketing Campaign Performing?

Today, marketers need to squeeze top performance out of budgets that are tighter than ever. And they have more tools than ever to do this.  There’s no need to crunch numbers on Excel spreadsheets anymore. CRM dashboards quickly and easily provide colorful charts and graphs, summarizing the information you need and enabling you to track and manage campaigns.

What can you check? Below are some examples:

• The number of leads a campaign generates
• One campaign versus another…determine which is the star performer
• Lead sources that produce better results than others

2. What’s in the Sales Pipeline?

“What’s in the sales pipeline?” is the age-old question. And now it doesn’t take any mental gymnastics to produce an answer.

You can set up a dashboard in your CRM system that gives you a snapshot of open, closed and lost opportunities. Open opportunities provide a window on the future. You can see at what stage your potential sales are in — this can be used to drive pipeline acceleration activities. And your lost or closed opportunities are worth exploring to learn what you can do better in the future, or, perhaps, types of companies that aren’t a good match.

Sales pipeline dashboards are not just for national and global sales leaders. Each sales person can use them to gain focus on their actual sales versus quota, whether or not they’re on track, and what they need to do to achieve their goals.

3. What’s the Sales Forecast?

Now that you have a dashboard that shows the sales pipeline, and reveals the percentage of leads that transform into opportunities and then into sales, your sales forecast practically builds itself. 

And, if you don’t like what the crystal ball tells you, you can dig into the data and determine what sales and marketing need to do to build a brighter future. Perhaps you can shorten the sales cycle with a prospect by providing vital information to them quicker. Maybe a sales manager needs to work with a sales rep to help him or her close a sale 

The Bottom Line 

The above three areas to explore with CRM are just the tip of the iceberg. Dig deeper into your CRM system, and you’ll learn more about the market segments, lists and tactics that drive results. These insights enable you to turn the knobs on your marketing dashboard, tweaking campaigns to maximize ROI.

About the Author:

Jeff Kalter is CEO of 3D2B, a global business-to-business telemarketing company that bridges the divide between marketing and sales. He leads customer acquisition programs for Fortune 500 companies, and is passionate about building strong business relationships through professional phone conversations. Follow him on Twitter: @jeffkalt

Want to learn more about CRM and what it can do for your business? Visit our website or download the free CRM handbook.