Quitting your day job and choosing to go into business for yourself in the 21st century is not a decision to take lightly. After all, while the digital marketplace may be ripe with opportunity, it’s also rife with competition. Every time you make a mistake, every time you or one of your employees does something to compromise the potency of your brand, every time a customer leaves feeling less than completely satisfied, your competitors close the gap between you, and if you’re not careful this can make them leave you in their dust. Thus, it’s essential that you maintain a great relationship with your customers, ensuring that not only do they leave with smiles on their faces, they are first in line when you have a new product or a special promotion that will benefit them. Unfortunately, if you don’t use Customer Relationship Management software, you run the risk of inhibiting your relationship with your customers and can potentially stymie your own sales and growth.
Why don’t all businesses use CRM?
There are many reasons why you may not currently use a CRM solution. It might simply represent yet another overhead cost that your business can do without. However, while capping your overheads to protect your profit margins is understandable, you shouldn’t be afraid to invest in any tool which could potentially facilitate growth.
Some entrepreneurs think that investing in a CRM is unnecessary since they can enact a CRM’s more basic functions with just a simple spreadsheet. But while a spreadsheet can be used to store the rudiments of customer data, it’s no substitute for a CRM platform. Here are some of the things that your business can’t do without a CRM…
Integrate your office tools
Not only is it a satisfying feeling when your office tools communicate with one another and work effectively together, it’s a real boon to the all-important productivity factor of your workplace. A good CRM can work with your email platform as well as call tracking software and your own customer support software to ensure that your operations run smoothly while also increasing your conversion rates and ensuring that your sales team don’t waste their time chasing leads that got away.
Allow sales professionals to work collaboratively
There’s a temptation to think of sales professionals as lone wolves, solitarily working their way towards their own personal targets. Sales professionals can and should, however, work collaboratively as a team, pooling their skills and resources for the good of the company. While a spreadsheet can be shared, it’s very difficult to collaborate on. CRMS allow multiple sales professionals to make notes and communicate with one another as they work together to move a prospect through the pipeline.
Understand and manage your sales pipeline
In order to effectively and strategically manage your business, it’s vital that you’re able to manage your sales pipeline, tracking your conversions and measuring them against your monthly targets. A CRM can pool this data for you in seconds, saving you hours of collecting and collating data from multiple sources.
If you don’t yet use a CRM platform, now’s the time to get one, and take your customer relationships into your own hands.
