TIME TO INVEST IN A CRM

Too many businesses follow a piecemeal approach to tracking contacts, relying on spreadsheets or ad hoc emails to capture information. This makes it difficult to find specific contacts, update information, delete conflicting accounts, and coordinate with team members. A centralized system makes it easier to maintain and access a complete, accurate list of contacts, especially as you accumulate new leads. If your sales team struggles to hunt down existing contact information, you know it’s time to invest in a CRM.

Without a CRM, it can be difficult to ensure that reports are based on the best information, as your contact lists may be incomplete, contain duplicates, or simply stale. A CRM can help your salespeople quickly run or automate reports and generate useful insights on customer responsiveness. Most importantly, it can give you confidence that your numbers are correct. Also, if your sales team spends their days creating manual reports, they’re devoting less of their attention to selling.

Without the right tools, your sales team may be letting valuable leads slip through no fault of their own. They may also be accidentally chasing down bad leads, duplicating efforts with other salespeople, or even following sales recommendations that get in the way of lead nurturing. By contrast, a well-managed CRM helps weed out bad data. It can also show your sales team what worked and what didn’t in terms of approach. This way, you can ensure the whole team is learning from the failures and successes of its members.

Although marketing and sales teams tend to operate separately, you need alignment between these teams to ensure that prospective clients have a seamless experience of your brand. After all, if your sales pitch and your marketing materials offer conflicting information, it can make your company appear unprofessional and poorly run. A CRM can help your sales and marketing teams coordinate, ensuring that they both have access to updated, accurate customer data. It can also provide visibility into the efforts taken by the other team, so they can better coordinate moving forward.

If your company is looking to scale, you will have to do more than simply collect leads. You’ll need an efficient system that lets your marketing and sales teams plan for long-term growth while minimizing errors and inefficiencies. A CRM can provide critical insight into past efforts, so your teams know what works for nurturing leads and which types of prospects are more responsive. It’s easier to know how to direct your sales efforts and where to invest your resources when you have the data to back you up.

When your salespeople have to rely on an ad-hoc method for tracking contacts, some of that data will invariably stay siloed from the rest of the sales team. Without a CRM, you are dependent on individual salespeople to maintain contacts — which means that if a salesperson leaves your company, customer information may get lost or even follow that person to their new job.