Why You Need A CRM Solution For Your Business.
If you believe that your customers are the heart of your business, you must also believe that having a tool to manage them well is essential. After all, they are the ones who pay your bills and your employees!
However, the reality is different: very often, companies manage customer files in Excel sheets. These Excel documents get lost, not updated, deleted, or overwritten by another file. Others may use a filing cabinet filled with business cards. It might seem convenient unless those cards stay on your desk!
These traditional ways of managing your contacts do not offer the possibility of collaboration and flexibility for companies and are not available all the time, everywhere. This is why CRM (for Customer Relationship Management) is a tool that allows you to collect, monitor, and measure the relationship you have with your customers and prospects.
Discover 4 reasons why you need a CRM!
1. Gather all the information from your contacts
The CRM allows you to bring together all the information of a contact, whether customer, prospect, or even supplier, in a single place. Unlike an Excel sheet, the CRM is multi-user, meaning that several users can access it at the same time, with different levels of access.
Each employee in your organization can therefore store basic contact information such as name, phone number, and email, but also any information you may need (birthday of a prospect, a service proposal, address, etc.). CRM is therefore a flexible tool that adapts to the information needs of your organization.
It is also a central place to gather all of a contact’s interactions with your business, whether they are emails, meetings, files sent, or files received. You can even leave your notes thereafter in a call or a meeting.
For a salesperson, speed and ease are always critical; spending precious time through your mailbox and your calendar to get the history of your relationship with a prospect or to find your last conversation is a huge waste of time.
A CRM provides a complete and accurate record of the history of an interaction with a contact accessible with one click. So sellers will never need to manually rebuild this timeline.
2. Better communication
By bringing all the information together in one place, CRM allows you to have better communication within your company. What if one of your salespeople spends time with a prospect that a coworker spoke with six months ago? Or, what if a salesperson leaves and their successor only has the customer’s business card?
With a CRM, representatives can immediately assess what has already been done with a prospect or customer. They don’t need to contact their colleagues to get the interaction history because the information they need is already in the CRM. It also facilitates the transfer of knowledge. It is often the oldest employees who have the most knowledge, and this knowledge is transmitted, most of the time, orally.
However, having a written record is essential! Software like CRM allows you to keep everything that has been done over time with your customers and prospects so you don’t have to redo everything.
You can check out this article on “how to choose the best CRM solution for your business”.
3. Simplify the work of salespeople
CRMs are not just communication and information storage tools; these are essential tools in sales, especially in sales processes based on the Inbound Sales approach.
They are then used to standardize the activities of each of the sellers. Without CRM, different salespeople can track activity in different ways, making it difficult for managers and leaders to have a consistent picture of the organization’s sales.
What are the monthly sales goals? Which seller achieves his goal? By making data entry consistent, it is then possible for managers to combine and analyze data to understand the overall sales state of the organization.
CRM also manages an organization’s sales funnel. At a glance, it’s easy to see how many prospects are at each stage (first call, proposal sent, proposal signed, etc.), and therefore, where a salesperson ends up with a goal.
Another attraction of a CRM is the integration with other tools. Since you want software that brings together all the interactions, your CRM must allow you to import external data such as invoicing or marketing activities. One of the most common integrations is with your email system. All you have to do is add a specific BCC address to an email or even synchronize your inbox, allowing you to not only see outgoing emails, but also incoming ones.
4. Scalable tool for your growth
What is your goal for the next few years?
If you are considering growth – getting more prospects, customers, and even salespeople – you need a tool that can support you in your development.
A CRM is an evolving tool that can manage several million contacts, and this, in a single interface.
With one or two clients, manual tracking of every interaction (even with Excel) is doable. Instead, think about where your business will be in five years.
You probably want to triple or quadruple your income, and the time your salespeople will spend storing information and communicating with each other could be way more than the cost of a CRM.
- What if you want to analyze your salespeople’s activities to find out which strategies work best?
- How to assess the effectiveness of your sales force?
All CRM tools have reporting capabilities that allow you to get a real picture of the situation, track it and analyze it to make better decisions.
In short, growing your business requires optimizing your ability to communicate with your prospects at the right time by providing them with the right information, and you simply cannot do it effectively without CRM.
Making the jump to CRM software might scare you, but the payoffs are huge. So do not wait any longer; improve your information storage, communication within your company as well as the work of your salespeople and be well equipped to grow your business.
If you are looking for a simple, free, and effective CRM tool, I highly recommend you check out this article on “How to choose the best CRM solution for your business“.
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