Think You Don’t Need CRM? Think Again.

Time and time again confident sales people will passionately tell you that they, and their team, don’t need CRM software to track their clients, follow up and close their sales consistently. They might exclaim “I have a spreadsheet system that works!”or “I’ve never dropped a lead before!” but that doesn’t mean something won’t go wrong in the future. Yes, confidence is a key quality of every successful salesperson, but this certainty could also be your downfall. Take this case that we came across just recently: a sales expert was completely convinced that his client system was bulletproof. That is, until he started taking on even more customers. Eventually, the volume of his workload overwhelmed his previously “foolproof” system, and he forgot to send a crucial follow-up email to a huge potential client. Unsurprisingly, his company lost that client—and more unsurprisingly, he took the fall for that loss. With the customization features and scalability of a CRM system, he could have easily avoided just this type of situation, wielding his software as a tool to pick apart and track the growing number of his clients and keep them all on track and satisfied right from the initial lead to the done deal.

So sure, there are plenty of reasons why you may think you or your company doesn’t need CRM software to succeed—and you are probably bristling at this post already, thinking that the system will just become a way for your sales manager to endlessly track your business. But here are four simple reasons why you are wrong, and how a well-selected CRM can help your company grow exponentially; keeping your job in the process.

Without CRM:

You Will Lose Clients

When you’re not using CRM software, your business size is specifically limited to your ability to retain information—as you gain more clients, more notes to keep on each one and ever varying emails you need to send at certain times, you are eventually going to reach a breaking point where you start forgetting key dates and information of certain customers, losing you the sale. As we can see in the aforementioned case study: human error can (and will) eventually happen even to the best of sales people, leading you to lose both an unsatisfied client and your credibility as a salesperson. If you have ever found yourself losing crucial sales due to a missed follow-up connection or simply wrong contact data, think what a CRM could do for you. The powerful software keeps your sales on pace throughout the entire processes: noting leads, automating that crucial first-follow up, and keeping key notes, contact info and purchase info accessible at the click of a button. CRM is not a replacement for you, it is your most essential tool, and if you utilize it properly it will help you improve your sales response and satisfaction exponentially.

You Are Wasting Time

We all get stuck in our comfortable routines sometimes—but take a second to think about whether your current non-CRM solution is really that efficient or even sustainable. Spreadsheets and notepads were not designed to be customer relations tools and thus they are not best suited to that task. How will your process hold up as your client base keeps growing and you have ever more notes to add to each case? Spreadsheets that aren’t constructed to have the capability to hold long notes and multiple cases will eventually become clunky and hard to navigate. Paper is easily lost. It simply doesn’t make sense to try and collect all of the disparate information that you need to sell effectively yourself to input into a system not designed for it. Moreover, when you need to share information among your team, or another member has to add a note or make a modification to a client file, you have to spend your valuable time disseminating the information and altering the document to your team’s or manager’s wishes. With CRM software, you have an intuitive method of data entry, an extremely usable interface to collate and compare that information and everyone in your team already has access and can make changes as necessary.

Sure, you could probably track and store all of the client info and data you need without CRM, but it would take a substantial amount of extra time and manpower that could be better utilized elsewhere, leading to inevitable human errors and holes in your database that someone will have to go back and fix. CRM software will automate all of these complex processes, leaving your sales team to perfect what they know best; selling.

You are Stalling Growth

Consider also the fact that you might have different record-keeping methods than others on your team: you enter all of your client’s info into that Excel spreadsheet while another simply saves client’s emails to refer back to. You can’t simply consolidate these wildly different forms of information. This leaves your company without the kind of big-picture look at their sales history that will help them learn what is working for the sales team, what isn’t, and create an accurate sales forecast from there. CRM systems like Salesforce help draw a complete picture of your all of your sales team’s customers, including their account histories, past communications and key contact data that will be crucial to drive your company’s revenue.

CRM software will help you develop your leads at the appropriate pace, wheeling them in, convincing them of the value of your services and sending them on to the right people in your company when they are ready. Implemented effectively and used correctly by the best sales people, the system becomes a powerful tool to start building growth.

Your Company is Not Transparent

A CRM system may seem like an oppressive and all seeing “Big Brother” force designed for your sales manager to track your every move, but this is quite simply the wrong way to view it. When a manager is able to view the progress of your sales and open cases they can not only see your successes and take more notice of them, they will also be able to coach you through low points or snags you keep encountering in a certain process. Every sales person will make a mistake in their lifetime, but the most successful ones are able own up to and then learn from them, making sure they hone in on what may have lost them the deal, and then never repeat that same mistake.

You may think that a CRM system will just alert the rest of the team to your errors, but in the end this can only help your sales record. After all, you cannot hide mistakes for ever: wouldn’t it be much more preferable if you could have an open conversation with your manager where you can back up your points, and what you think you did right in the process, with real data? Then, when you make that inevitable sales improvement afterward, the rest of the team will be able to directly attribute the uptick to your work—driving them to work even harder to keep up. A little friendly competition within the sales team can only do good things for the entire company in the long run, and a CRM system will foster the fire in each sales team to keep up with the company sales goals and keep their clients happy.

Wrap Up

You may be getting by fine without it now, but that doesn’t mean your company doesn’t need CRM to truly realize its full potential. The software will increase sales efficiency, improve customer interaction and will become an active driver of ROI.  Whether you are a part of a sales team of five or fifty, your manager needs an overview of their department (be it leads, open clients or new transactions) to make the decisions crucial to the business. Without an accurate and complete sales history and timeline, you or someone else run the risk of dropping clients, losing data key to revenue growth and stunting the success of your company. In short, you need CRM to keep your business competitive in the ever modernizing world. Spending the initial investment now can only save and generate money (and clients!) in the future. To get more information on how a CRM can work for you and how to integrate it successfully into your business, contact an expert at Datix.