When builders are constructing a house, they always start with the foundation. Whether the house has a basement or sits above the ground they always begin by laying the foundation.
Your CRM tool is the foundation of your business. What is CRM? It is precisely a Customer Relationship Management software, it is an interactive software tool that allows you to organize and manage your business contacts, sales cycle, and much more.
It is very important to incorporate this tool from the beginning so that your contact data does not spawn out of control. I will give you 5 reasons why a CRM tool should be your first business management software.
1) Keeps you organized and efficient -
instead of trying to find business cards, scrolling through your excel file or even sticky notes with information written on it you will have you one place to store all your business information like leads, customer contacts, partners, company information, potential deals, closed deals, contracts, quotes, product and service info, and much more. This allows you to be organized and super-efficient because you can find information when you need it instead of spending time looking for it.
2) Build better relationships and know when to follow up with contacts -
Yes, we all know outlook can provide reminders and tasks, however, it's not as effective as a CRM tool. With a CRM tool, you can set tasks and manage them from a daily task list. If a prospect wants you to contact them in a day, a week, a year, it doesn't matter because you can set up the following dates accordingly. It even shows you when tasks are overdue and has not been addressed or closed out yet. The beauty of having this in a CRM tool is having information related to a specific contact all in once place helps you to build stronger relationships...
3) Know what stages your deals are in -
Let's face it, deals are the lifeline of your business. With a CRM tool, you can define and manage each opportunity in your pipeline. If you just discovered a potential deal you can define it as stage-1 10% closed and increase the stage and the percentage as the deal goes through your sales process. For example, if you do a call or a presentation with a prospective customer you can now move this to stage-2 or 20% towards closing. Most CRM tools allow you to define these stages according to your business processes.
4) Have one centralized place for your sales team as you expand your team -
With disparate sources of information like spreadsheets and outlook, each person on your team is entering information in a separate place, therefore Tom might not know that XYZ deal was closed or that anyone was even working on it so then he reaches out to them only to learn that they are already customers. This is not a very good impression on customers and makes a business look disorganized and can confuse customers. With a CRM tool, Tom will be able to see that the XYZ deal was already closed and who the sales rep is.
Also, as your team grows in size each team member can get their own individual login into the CRM and can contribute to growing your database of contacts leads, opportunities, and sales.
5) Make better decisions from a glance -
Use amazing visualization charts and diagrams to see if your sales pipeline is adequate to meet your monthly, quarterly, or yearly goals. Most CRM software is loaded with powerful analytics that can show baste on a chart or diagram where you are in sales, which salesperson is performing the best or worst in any given month, quarter, year, or overall. You can also visualize which marketing campaigns or tradeshows are yielding more sales and opportunities results.
Connect with other essential software to manage your business more effectively and efficiently
Industry-specific CRM tools are available for whatever kind of business your in and these tools will incorporate things related to your business.