Now I’m not saying teams don’t use CRM to help manage their sponsorship business – we see great usage of our KORE ProSports Sponsorship module to manage inventory, create proposals, generate contracts and track fulfillment of assets. However, one thing we’ve been trying to stress more recently is to not overlook the basics of activity and relationship data.
I had a recent conversation with an executive at another team and he mentioned this is something they struggle with. How much do they push their staff to log calls and appointments vs. what is the value of spending time on that. In general, there can be a middle ground where staff log activities “of note” – anything involving key learnings, important meetings and relationship data. However, I caution a bit that the more you rely on staff to make a judgment call on what is or isn’t important, they will be more and more likely to go with the path of least resistance, in other words, hardly logging anything.
So what do we do to fix this? Sometimes the easiest things are the simplest, things like:
•Hustleboards to make sure staff are at least hitting basic minimum thresholds.
•Reports and Dashboards that feature the most recent activity date and details of that activity.
•Key custom fields on the Contact and Account level that your staff are encouraged to complete and are judged on.
•Easier interfaces that help overcome the objection to using the system.
And finally, with any CRM-related initiative, its key to get philosophical buy-in from the key executives in that department. If they don’t believe in it and don’t check on the usage, then their staff won’t either.
Want to learn more? Download KORE Software’s “10 Tips for Improving Partner Relationships Through CRM.”
Written by: Russell Scibetti