Accidental CRM Admins: What to Learn Beyond the Daily Tasks (Part 3)
By this point in your Accidental Admin journey, you likely already implemented the software and provided basic user training. You’ve also learned the best channels for support and started to resolve issues independently. You’re comfortable explaining what functionality your business uses and have a mini-road map established for where you’re hoping to innovate in Phase 2.
(Not there yet? Go back to №2.)
This is a critical point as a software admin as you’re reaching the official end of implementation. First, pat yourself on the back — you successfully implemented a project assigned to you because no one realized they’d need someone to manage the software for its longevity!
Now, yet again, you must decide whether you’re going to tip your hat to an implementation well done, or embrace the responsibility of an administrator — ensuring the software stays up to date with changing processes, new users, updates, and new challenges.
Since you’ve made it this far, I assume your answer is: “Uh, fine. Let’s do it!”
And with that cheery excitement, it’s now time to actually learn stuff. I hear you, “What do you mean actually learn stuff — have I not been learning this whole time!?”
Well, kind of. What you learn for implementation is typically focused on your business processes and the basics of how those will work using the software. Your knowledge also just scratches the surface of what’s possible in a CRM software — knowing fields and what button does what — but you likely didn’t make any adjustments or build-outs without the supervision of an implementation partner or the software team itself.
Companies may call an implementation a success if it’s on time and in budget, but the software may die flat if that’s the end of its improvement and integration into the business.
Remember that list of stuff people said would be nice to have in the new system? What about that report sales wanted to see of top earners? And didn’t operations want projections of forecasted product so they could plan accordingly? Why is Norma still going into the old excel files to look up info?
These are all those loose ends that weren’t mission-critical to the implementation’s success, but now need to be addressed. (Or forgotten, but you already said you’re willing to take on the official admin challenge!)
So, yes, dear accidental admin, it’s time to actually learn MORE stuff.
Unfortunately, your boss will not outline what you should learn and say, “Here’s $1,000,000 and a full year of time to learn everything you need to know to accomplish this!” You’ll need to spend time on your own identifying what you need to learn and how you’re going to get there. This is why it was so important early on to know what your support resources are, because now they’ll come into play as you prioritize your learning.
After being in your shoes, I’ve uncovered a few key activities that an admin should add to their skillset at this stage. These are basic tasks that are critical to maintaining your system and keeping the data clean and useful.
Things can go downhill in a CRM real quick if you allow sales reps like Judas to create ten of the same opportunities because he skipped training and never could figure out how to find ones he created (inflating the pipeline). Or if service rep Luka deletes cases already resolved because he didn't realize he needs to mark them as closed instead (data loss).
Like I’ve written about before, my experience is in using Salesforce and industry-specific software systems, so I’ll draw on those as my examples. The basic functions, however, are a part of any CRM software, so you can find related functions to master regardless of what system you’re working in.
Data Management 101
How to Import Records to Reduce Data-Entry
Most CRM systems have import features to pull in data from outside sources even after the initial data dump. Knowing what tools exist and how to use them can save you and your users valuable time. No one wants to be bogged down by data entry — it’s a surefire way to make your users hate you and the system!
Import tools help you work smarter, not harder. Usually, systems have two types of import tools — one that’s admin-friendly, and one that’s for a developer. For example, Salesforce has at least three import tools. Each one was used for different scenarios, so as an admin, it was important to know when to use which tool. For example, for a quick upload of 50 new leads, I’d use the Import Wizard, but if it was the import of our entire customer book from our old system, that was a developer tool instead.
After our most recent implementation, I discovered a user who sold a specific product line that didn’t have their contacts imported at the initial stage. As our team grew, the product line expanded to other sales reps, so the contact information for each account became critical knowledge. The user was shying away from putting his contacts in because he figured he’d have to do it one by one — a very laborious data entry task!
Working with our user, I asked him to compile a pre-formatted excel sheet with his contact information. Then using the import tool in our software, it took about ten minutes to assign new contact IDs to the records, scan for duplicates, and import the contacts. Voila! Now the whole team could benefit from the information.
When it takes ten minutes to increase the visibility of your business, this is a value-add to the company. Any time you accomplish tasks like this, it’s something to celebrate as an admin. In this case, the information became visible so our Account Managers appeared more knowledgable to our clients. Instead of asking clients who they should talk to about this product line, the manager could look in the system and clearly see who we’re already in touch with. That improves the customer experience!
How & When to Export Data
Exporting data isn’t as fun, in my opinion. As an admin, when I see users exporting data to Excel — I’m both happy and sad. I’m happy they’re finding valuable data to accomplish a goal. I’m sad because they’re not using it live in the system and instead pulling it to a spreadsheet.
I know that different goals require different levels of access. As an admin, I like to teach my users when to use exporting to help in specific scenarios. I’m careful not to do a blanket “this is how you export” training because live data as a report or dashboard is usually better than a one-time export. Plus, the last thing we want is a user exporting sensitive data and saving locally…or worse…sharing! (See Security section.)
Exporting data is more useful for an admin, and it’s a great way to control access to data outside the system. For admins, the most essential export activity you can do is a data backup. Some systems take automatic backups on your behalf, and others require you to schedule them or pull them manually. You should know the parameters in your software and take regular backups to protect your company’s assets. It’s likely no one else is thinking about this — so if and when a data loss disruption occurs, you’ll once again be the hero who had the smarts to take backups of the system.
Active vs. Inactive Records, Deleting Records
Remember Luka? The service rep who’s deleting cases when he’s finished working on them? Yikes.
First off, see if you can turn delete permissions off for certain users. If not, don’t teach them how. If they find out, like Luka, teach him the best practice.
Turning permissions off for users that really shouldn’t be deleting records is the best way to protect your data. When I used Salesforce, no one on our team except for me, the admin, and one service manager, had delete permissions on records. If they accidentally recreated something or needed it deleted, they just pinged me quick in Chatter. This became a much faster and easier solution for all of us rather than trying to dig out an accidentally deleted record. While Salesforce is pretty user-friendly when it comes to data recovery, other systems aren't— and you’ll find yourself digging in the backend hoping to find the record, or worse, having to revert back to the last backup.
Admins need to understand how deleting records works in the system, and then evaluate the parameters around active and inactive records as well. Then, you’ll need to establish the best practice for your instance. For example, what do you do with a contact if they leave? Inactivate? Delete? What about a company that goes out of business?
If your CRM feeds to other parts of an ERP, like finance, then you’ll want to collaborate with those departments for best practices, too. If you inactivate a company, how does it affect any outstanding payments? If you delete a company, what happens to the sales history?
Admins also need to know deleted record management — if a record is deleted, where does it go? Are they held somewhere for a period of time? Can you recover them? When do they delete forever? Sometimes, inactivating records is much safer for the org as a result of this insight. Regardless, these concepts are important to understand to maintain the integrity of your org.
Keeping Data Clean
Alright, now on to sales rep Judas who’s making way too many opportunities for the same sale. At a minimum, this inflates the sales pipeline and affect the close rate. The unclean data leads to false perceptions of what’s happening in your team.
Admins should regularly check in on reports, service cases, sales opportunities, and related objects that function to collect business activity for accuracy.
Support tickets and sales opportunities are good examples. Are they being closed out on time? Are the fields filled in? Why not? Are users saying “other” or “in progress” all the time for field choices?
Admins don’t need ot fix all these issues, they need to identify them and educate their users on best practices as they are developed.
It might not always be user error either. For example, in my most recent implementation, we changed the way we log customer records, moving from a bill-to record with multiple ship-tos listed, to a separate record for each. This solved a lot of problems up front, but we weren't able to identify all of them immediately. Once working in the system, we realized it affected our contact listings, since they could only be assigned to one customer record, not the main facility and its associated ship-to records. Because we monitored record creation, we were able to identify this issue and create a workaround to retrain the team. Otherwise, imagine all the extra duplicated contacts that would've been created!
Permissions & Security
User Permissions
User permissions is the bane of every admin’s existence (at least it’s mine). Zillions of times, I would finish a training and tell my users to try it themselves later. Then, the bloody email, “I don’t have access.”
Uh. Dang it.
Every time I feel like I let them down. I suppose the first note is to always test before you deploy, but sometimes even that allows things to slip through the cracks. The Golden Rule to avoid this embarrassment: Know what permissions users are granted and how to revoke and add as needed.
Salesforce is robust in this area. It seems like you can control down to the exact field on an exact record what someone can or can not see. This is great — until you have yourself so in the weeds that you can’t tell what setting needs to be adjusted to adjust functionality for the user.
In other systems, it’s super open: You either can see CRM, or can’t see CRM. Maybe you can group in users as admins, supervisors, and subordinates, but that’s about as robust as it gets. This is also great — until you have the “Luka salesmen” running around deleting data. In these types of systems, best practices need to be built around the levels of permission available on the back end to control a user’s activity. Knowing the options allows admins to best advise how different users should be set up and how to best protect the data.
User permissions is also a huge part of security, let’s tackle that next.
Security
While user permissions are pretty straight forward once you understand what impacts what in the system, security can be a bit harder to grasp as a non-IT person.
Cloud-based softwares are more popular than ever, especially in light of the pandemic, so it’s critical to at least have a basic understanding of how your org is protected in the cloud and what options you have as an admin to support that.
For example, in Salesforce admins can set login hours, whitelist IP addresses, and allow for two-factor login security. These are all good options when users log in outside of the office. For other softwares, VPN networks are often used to port into the software. These come with their own allowances for security as well.
As an admin, being aware of how things are set up and protected will help you better understand what you can and cannot do to protect your data.
Start Down the Business Analyst Path
Learn Basic Formula Functions
Knowing the backend of the system and the data table relationships makes you a prime candidate for building reports. The real power of a CRM system is when you use the data to make decisions at your business. Reporting is a tool that brings increased visibility to your data and showcases it in new ways. This is a big value-add for the company if done and used right!
The business analyst role typically is looking at the data and determining what’s useful data, what’s not, and how to view it to take meaningful action. They go beyond just looking at a list of open opportunities — instead ask questions about what are closest to close, what percentage are new customers, how many widgets are in queue?
You probably already can think of a number of questions simply based on what you hear departments asking for in meetings. You now have the power to put data behind their questions and assumptions. This allows the business to take calculated risk and provides insight into opportunities that have the best chance for success.
To learn how to build meaningful reports, learn basic formula functions. Even if you use user-friendly CRMs like Salesforce that make it easy to create reports, you’ll still find value in knowing the basic functions. This will help you create even more meaningful data from the raw data in your system. Look for formulas for sorting, calculating, filtering, lookups, if/then, etc.
Reporting increases visibility to the business, and its’ the most flashy, fun, and meaningful way to prove ROI of your new software. The role of business analyst is also a highly valued position in a business and can help identify huge opportunities for your company — in cost savings, classifying hot leads, rewarding stellar users, finding users that need more training, etc.
This is an area where thinking like your users will best pay off. If you’re the sales manager looking at the teams opps, what do you want to see first? What do you care about? I’ve found more often than not, because of my knowledge of the system and the data in it, I was able to help sales managers identify what they should care about in reporting. It’s a weird twist of events, but it sure is empowering! You’re becoming a linchpin! (Not that you weren’t before…just sayin’.)
Create Connections at Transition Points in Your Processes
The connection points among departments can often be black holes in a company. What happens once sales sells a product? How are they notified when it shipped to their client? Who warned finance to send the invoice?
These are areas where automation potential lies. Automating these types of communications reaps exponential ROI from your software because you allow the system to do the work so your teams function more efficiently.
For example, our sales team always sent a visit report email to a group of department leaders in addition to logging their report in the system. This work at its core is duplicate entry. As an admin, you should be able to recognize these scenarios as opportunities for automation. Using the inherent function in the system (I didn’t even have to build anything!), we were able to eliminate the email and automated a notification to be sent after a visit report was logged in CRM. Happy sales people, indeed!
Another example of effectively managing handoff of key stages in quote to cash occurred when we needed to quote a product. The opportunity would be in CRM, but our reps would use email to ask the quoting team to create a quote on that opportunity — copying all the content into their email just to notify them. What happens to that email? How does the salesmen know when its received, in progress, or completed? On the flip side, the quoting team had a hard time keeping track of the requests in email.
We looked at CRM and realized we could accomplish both the handoff and management with less steps and better traceability. By assigning an opp to the quoting team using a CRM field, they had a queue of open assignments in a list view. When they finished, they attached the quote right to the opportunity (great file management and tracking) and reassigned it back to the salesman. Nothing gets lost in email!
Monitoring where the transition points are among departments is a great place to use automation and CRM tools to help track, report, and better manage data and communications.
You’re An Admin Now
At this point, you must consider yourself an admin. You know the system inside and out, you’re proficient in onboarding new users, you’re able to identify new opportunities to use the system to increase visibility in your company, and you have the skillset to help back big decisions with relevant data. Congratulations — and by the way, document every, single thing you do to work and improve the system. As a solo admin so much of this is behind the scenes and come review time, you should be recognized for this work.
What you learn in these areas — data management, permissions and securing, and business analyst skills, will set up your continued learning for years to come. The next step is to get certified and build a routine of continuous learning for yourself.
To get the rest of my advice in this series, hit the “Follow” button above!
The Complete Accidental Admin Series By Courtney Cerniglia:
