How to Recession-Proof Your CRM: A Guide for RevOps Leaders

According to the World Bank’s latest global economic forecast, investors, bankers, and entrepreneurs have been discussing the chances of a recession for months. But whether a recession is coming or the markets will bounce back, it’s always essential to have a solid plan for ensuring your CRM (customer relationship management) system can handle any economic fluctuation. 

During economic uncertainty, making your CRM "Recession-Proof" helps ensure your sales data is accurate so your organization keeps growing and your pipeline keeps moving.

What Does It Mean To Make A CRM Recession-Proof? 

A Recession-Proof CRM is essential for organizational growth, productivity, and profitability during an economic downturn. It means keeping track of sales data that you could be at risk of losing during times of layoffs, thereby saving you from losing deals because of inaccurate or incomplete data. 

Why is it Important to Recession-Proof Your CRM?

There are several reasons why it is essential to Recession-Proof your CRM. It goes beyond just ensuring your customers stick with you during challenging economic times.

Improved Sales Productivity & Efficiencies

Recession-Proofing your CRM helps you focus on closing deals without having to worry if your reps have been manually logging data. How quickly can your sales reps follow up with leads? Are you able to use your data for accurate sales forecasting? You need complete and accurate data within your CRM to get maximum efficiency. 

Minimize Losses

Recession-Proofing your CRM ensures you have the real-time data you need to increase sales and grow your business despite any economic slowdowns. 

Haggai Levi, CEO and Founder of SetSail, notes, “Sales is experiencing the biggest paradigm shift since the pandemic. So, revenue leaders must guide their teams properly through tough economic times like this because it minimizes the loss of future customer revenue through flexible deals and discount offerings”.

Haggai believes reducing fluctuations in recurrent revenue streams is possible by having long-term contracts for customers. “This reduces the chance of customer switching rates because they get extensive and diverse offerings and long-term deals," he says.

Gather Complete Data

Incomplete data is dangerous for sales and revenue teams. Without accurate, clean, and complete data—gathered and analyzed in real time—you can’t make the decisions you need to protect your business in any recession or economic slowdown. SetSail's Sales Data Hub has proven to be 97% accurate in its data collection and mapping.

How Sales Leaders Can Recession-Proof Their CRMs

To prepare for a recession, sales leaders must continue to: 

Automate Your Data

One of the best ways to Recession-Proof your CRM is to automate your data entry. For example, SetSail automatically captures every sales meeting, call, and email and writes it back to your CRM without relying on your reps to log everything. This ensures that your sales data is always accurate, updated, and accessible—even after a rep leaves your company (or a client’s company).

Set Revenue Goals

It’s crucial to set revenue goals for your organization so that you can measure your progress and ensure that you are on track. Revenue goals are essential because they give you a north star to guide your decision-making. 

Revenue teams use SetSail's sales dashboards to help them track leading indicators to help hit their revenue goals. SetSail’s dashboards give you a complete view of your sales pipeline and performance, including crucial deal milestones and buying signals. 

“Despite the maturity of the CRM space, running efficient sales programs has always been the Achilles heel of revenue organizations,” says CEO Levi. “By introducing a new program management layer on top of SetSail’s intelligent signals, we are making it easy for sales managers to guide their teams towards in-quarter goals. Just like ABM ushered us into the age of programmatic marketing, Revenue Acceleration Programs ensure teams can rally around specific growth objectives—with clear accountability and higher impact on key behaviors.”

Plan for Account Transitions

It’s vital to plan how you will transition your accounts during a recession. Whether employees from your organization are leaving or employees from potential customers are leaving, Recession-Proofing your CRM means you won’t lose vital information during these times. 

You need it to retain correct contact information, gather data from emails, phone calls, or messages sent to employees that left, and know how to continue the sales conversation and with who.  

Train Your Team in Best Practices

Training your team in best practices for Recession-Proofing your CRM is essential. This includes teaching them how to identify at-risk accounts, transition accounts, and set revenue goals.

You can also train your team on Sales Territory Mapping. By establishing "territories," you can effectively utilize resources and sales procedures inside a defined field that you develop using derived data and an awareness of your market. Sales leaders can continuously evaluate and improve performance inside each area thanks to territories, which eventually enables them to maximize sales.

At SetSail, we also prioritize Revenue Execution: teaching customer-facing representatives the statistically validated strategies for success. It’s also about incentivizing them with a new third bucket of compensation, in addition to base and commission, to deliver sales excellence.

The Sales Tools You Choose Matter

While many platforms are on the market, not all are created equal. Don’t lose any precious data that your sales and revenue teams have spent their time and effort gathering. 

At SetSail, we make Recession-Proof CRMs a reality by securely and privately capturing, enriching, and mapping your sales data without manually logging data. We surface your data in our easy-to-use application, your CRM, BI platform, or data lake of your choice. 

Every critical engagement is logged, so you don’t lose data despite account transitions or personnel changes. 

By Recession-Proofing your CRM and ensuring that your sales data is complete and actionable, you can weather any economic downturn and come out on top. Contact us today to learn more about our services and access the best tools and resources to help you Recession-Proof your CRM.