5 Major Benefits of Logging Meetings in Your CRM

Have you struggled with getting your sales team embrace entering meeting details in your CRM? Or, have they entered the meetings, but not the meeting notes? 

If you answered yes to either of these questions, you're definitely not alone. 

As you start pushing for CRM adoption at your firm, there will likely be some resistance. It's normal, and it will take some time before everyone is 100% on board.

But, it's important to remind yourself and your team that the benefits always out weight the initial effort.

Entering meetings scheduled and meeting notes into your CRM is one of the simplest, but most important things your sales team can do.

However, under current situations, the workflow to get those meetings entered is clunky, which makes things difficult. Entering meetings into Salesforce can be challenging because it so often means double entry: scheduling the meeting on your calendar, then entering it into Salesforce, then coming back later and entering your notes.

It's tedious. 

However, if you’re able to get the scheduled meetings into your CRM 100% of the time, there’s a ton of doors that will open for you.

In this article, we're outlining the five key benefits of entering meeting notes, and all of the subsequent things you'll be able to do with that information. By the end of the article, you'll have a clear path forward, and a better understanding of the benefits of using your CRM to the fullest extent. 

1. Create lists, by salesperson, of the meetings they’ve had over a set amount of time

Whether that list contains activity from the last 2 weeks, 30 days, 90 days etc., logging meetings in your CRM will allow you to know exactly how many meetings each salesperson has had, and with whom. This simple task allows your team to be much more organized so that they can focus on effective and efficient follow-up in a timely manner. 

2. Create team score cards

Once you have meetings entered and lists created, your organization can now create and run reports. When a meeting is scheduled, you'll need to enter a meeting type: client services, first time, follow up, etc. Once you have that down, you'll be able to run reports by meeting types to create score cards tracking the number of meetings, the meeting type, etc.

Because of this, everyone on the team has insight into these key, important metrics, which is critical as you continue to build and execute against your pipeline. 

3. Create a seamless onboarding plan

By entering the meetings that have been scheduled, you're essentially creating a map for new salespeople as they join the team. Now that you're tracking and keeping a log of all the meetings that have been done, if there’s turnover, a new salesperson can easily takes over and see exactly where the prior salesperson was meeting, with whom, etc.

This allows any new team members to know exactly where their predecessor has been, and what they’ve done. It’s costly for the organization not to capture these things.. they’re losing money when they don’t track.

4. Keep everyone informed with auto-generated report emails

With meetings entered in your CRM, automated emails can be created out of your CRM that will send an email at the end of the day showing a list of all meetings that have been scheduled by the team.

With this, the whole team is able to see what the day looked like in terms of all the things they’ve done. What type of meetings were help, with whom, when it was scheduled for. This one simple email ensures that everyone is on the same page about what’s being done, even if they're on the road.

5. Make data-driven decisions

Now that you're able to analyze the activity performance of your sales team, you'll be able to make much more informed decisions about next steps, growth, and goals. 

How to get started

There is always a root cause if your CRM isn’t getting adopted. More often than not, this is because the information within the CRM is not useful to the sales team; if it was, everyone would be logging in. If the data was up to date, and they could view past activity to inform their follow-up outreach, it would be a no-brainer.

However, we know that people to change natural behaviors is really hard — instead of fighting an uphill battle, you have to make it useful. 

What's more, they're able to log meeting notes directly in the app, which will auto-upload into Salesforce.