Have a list of the questions that your executives, managers, and individual contributors need to know the answers to daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly. 

This list is the guide for your reporting because your reports need to answer those questions (and the follow-up questions if something looks off)

Build your reporting and keep it simple. Focus on the relationships between things.

And always have it weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly. For example, New contacts created vs contacts worked vs deals created vs deals closed.

Understand that 9 out of 10 times the cause of problems in your CRM is bad or missing data that is caused by an insufficient or over-engineered process.

And the killer is that all your tools rely on your data. So bad data = useless reports and ineffective automations.

 The best way to prevent bad data is to make data your priority and keep things simple. 

Build a “data-hygiene” dashboard to help you monitor your fill percentages on your critical properties.

Have a regular cadence to review & maintain your data.

Include associations to monitor (deals with no contacts, etc).

The wrong question to ask is “Is our CRM working for us”

The right question to ask is “To what extent is our CRM working for us”.

You’ll get more out of your CRM if you view it as a continuum to be managed, rather than a problem to be solved.

The Continuum has Agility on one end and Accuracy on the other. The sweet spot for your org is somewhere in between.

Have a list of your most important properties per team that drive everything. Note where their inputs come from, and when those inputs happen.

It can be a simple list on a doc and doesn’t need to contain anything else. If anyone needs to make any changes in your CRM, refer them to this list first.