Why You Need CRM Software

Time and time again, confident sales people will passionately tell us that they don’t need CRM software to help them do their jobs. Take this all-to-common scenario: A sales rep is completely convinced that their current method is bulletproof—that is, until they start taking on even more customers. Overwhelmed, they forget to send a crucial follow-up email to a huge potential client. The company loses the client—and the salesperson takes the fall. This situation could easily be avoided with CRM software tracking their growing number of clients and keeping them satisfied from the initial contact to signing the deal. 

Yes, confidence is a key quality of every successful salesperson, but this confidence shouldn’t deter sales teams from improving their tools and strategies. Even if you think your sales operations are going smoothly without CRM, the software is essential for delivering better customer experiences, speeding up sales cycles and mitigating risk. Check out how your business is falling short without CRM, and learn how implementing the solution will fuel business growth. 

Without CRM. . . 

You Will Lose Clients

When you’re not using CRM software, your business size is limited to the amount of information you can retain. As you gain more clients, you also accumulate more notes and have to manually keep track of touch points and tasks to nurture the relationship. Eventually, your sales team will reach a breaking point and start forgetting key dates and information, costing you the sale. Human error can—and will—happen, even to the best of salespeople. To acquire and retain customers, you’ll need a CRM solution to mitigate risk and automate processes. 

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 process, noting leads, automating that crucial first follow-up and storing contact information in a single location. CRM doesn’t replace your sales team; it is your department’s most essential tool for closing deals and meeting quotas. 

You Are Wasting Time

We all get stuck in our comfortable routines, but take a second to think about your current methodology. Is it really an efficient or sustainable approach? Spreadsheets and notepads were not designed to be customer relationship tools. Paper gets easily lost, meaning that critical reminders or phone numbers will fall off your desk. Overtime, spreadsheets become long and difficult to navigate. Staying on top of your own data and tasks is difficult enough with these methods. Sharing this information with your team and refining sales strategies is nearly impossible. With modern customers more demanding than ever, it doesn’t make sense to continue using outdated, error-prone systems. 

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. Plus, it would lead to inevitable human errors and holes in your processes and information. With CRM software, you have an intuitive method of data entry, an extremely usable interface to collate and compare information and a single place for your team to access and update data. CRM software automates menial operations, leaving your sales team to perfect what they know best—selling.

You Have Limited Visibility

CRM might seem like an oppressive “Big Brother” designed for your sales manager to track your every move, but that’s not what it is at all. Rather than simply expose mistakes, CRM gives you a full view of your team’s performance and provides a complete record of customers. When different sales reps are using different methods to store data, your company can’t see the big picture to find out what’s working and what isn’t. That also means you can’t create an accurate sales forecast or improve existing strategies, resulting in declining sales.

CRM systems draw a complete picture of your entire department’s customers, including their account histories, past communications and key contact data. Some vendors, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce, also include advanced analytics tools to translate this information into predictions and suggestions, so you can make the right move to close a deal. By maintaining these insights in one place, your team can work together to make data-driven decisions and plan for future growth. That means no more guesswork and confusion. Dynamic reports and dashboards will show you exactly what’s happening and enable you to create an informed plan for success.

Wrap Up

You may be getting by 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 interactions and drive ROI. Without an accurate and complete sales history and timeline, you run the risk of dropping clients, losing key data and stunting the success of your company.

At Datix, we’ve been helping manufacturers and distributors implement and manage their CRM solutions for over 20 years. A certified partner of both Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM and Salesforce, our consultants know the CRM best practices that will help you maximize the value of your investment and align the software with your business needs. Using our Unity integration solution, we can also seamlessly connect your CRM with Epicor ERP, giving you a single source of truth to enhance your enterprise efficiency and visibility. 

To get more information about how CRM can work for you and how to integrate it successfully into your business, contact an expert at Datix.

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