5 Signs Your Business Needs a CRM Solution

Buying software and changing your business processes is a major decision. The same is true if you are considering changing software tools such as adopting CRM software. After all, it affects your sales, your marketing and your service workflows. It probably costs money to implement as well. However, you may be losing money if you don’t change when your business is in dire need of Customer Relationship Management software. Here are five signs your business needs a CRM solution.

The Productivity of Your Staff is Falling

Manual processes like filling out forms and filing them or maintaining spreadsheets take a lot of time. What worked when you had a few dozen clients becomes unworkable when you have hundreds or thousands of people, and the productivity of your staff falls as they struggle to scale up inefficient systems. CRM systems replace these manual processes, automating a lot of data entry and repetitive work. The faster access to accurate data increases revenue per salesperson by forty percent. This allows the organization to grow, and CRM systems will scale much better than your paper filing system.

It can improve the productivity of the rest of the team by giving everyone a single, shared interface containing all of the relevant data. One study found that three fifths of employees say they have to search through four or more systems to find information. That’s wasted time in every case, and it can lead to mistakes. Whether your customer is placing an order, calling customer service or talking to the warranty department, all notes about the customer interactions and all of their history is available to whomever is working with them at that moment. Anyone in the organization can see where clients are in the lifecycle and know exactly what they need.

Sometimes the issue is the basic CRM system you have. Hubspot is one of the most widely used CRM tools, but it is easy to end up with it being just another database to maintain. You may need help integrating it with your website or existing databases. This is where consultants like Chief Martech Officer come in. These HubSpot experts can optimize HubSpot, making it easier to administer or create the custom reports you need. Or you may need help training staff in the proper use of Hubspot’s features, so that their productivity will hit the levels you hoped for.

You Don’t Know What Your Sales Team is Doing

If you don’t know what your sales team is doing, you probably need a CRM system. CRM systems give you visibility into the sales process. They create a centralized place where all information about their schedules and clients are, typically in easy to read dashboards. You can see how many appointments each person has and the number of prospects they’re working with. This allows you to ensure that sales leads don’t fall through the cracks, and you can hold salespeople accountable when they didn’t follow up. You’ll reduce the number of missed sales, and that will improve the bottom line.

You Don’t Know How Your Sales Team Is Performing

CRM systems eliminate tedious, manual reporting. The Customer Relationship management system will generate the reports with a few clicks, freeing up your time for the more important task of analyzing it.

CRM systems allow you to compare the performance of sales people relative to their targets. It allows you to see how your team is doing relative to department goals, and you can pull up this information at any time. It gives you the up-to-date information you need to take corrective action instead of being surprised you fell short of your goals this month.

You won’t have to worry about creating reports and trying to figure out what they mean, either. CRM systems have built-in reporting and data analysis to give you an insight into customer demographics, seasonal trends, and preferences for individual customers or entire groups. You can study the buying habits of existing customers and start to work on nurturing existing business relationships.

Customer Service is Inconsistent or Constantly Bad

If customer service is inconsistent, your organization doesn’t have a shared set of information and business processes. This means that one department may have great service but another doesn’t. And a third department may fall short of good customer service because they simply don’t have the information that they need to do the right thing. All of this contributes to low customer satisfaction. A customer relationship management system allows you to give all customer-facing employees access to all prospect and customer information, and it can be used to standardized business processes.

A side benefit of adopting a CRM system is that it ensures accountability. Customers don’t fall through the cracks because no one took responsibility for a prospect or didn’t follow up on a customer’s problems. You must implement a good CRM system to be able to work on customer experience management.

You Don’t Know What You Do and Don’t Know

How many clients do you have? Who are your clients? If you don’t know this, you may let a lead walk out the door because you didn’t take a hot lead seriously. If you are relying on a key person to know everything, you run the risk of losing information because their laptop was infected with a virus or they left the company. With a CRM system, all of the information is stored in a centralized location.

Furthermore, that data can be backed up to a safe, alternate location. You can pull reports to find out anything you need to know, and you don’t have to worry about mistakes made because people lacked the information they needed to make the right decision. You’ll also know that your departing sales team won’t leave with a list of all their customers.

CRM tools allow you to improve the customer experience and improve the bottom line. Once your business reaches a certain point, you can’t afford not to have a CRM system.

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