It is not an uncommon experience for me to find myself having the “do I need CRM” conversation. Executives will site lack of visibility, inability to manage the business to established measures, no protection for institutional data, and a host of other issues. Oddly, I rarely here reasons like, I want to make my sales team more effective. I want to provide tools to increase close ratios or lead processing time. The need for CRM usually starts with the executive, the guy who writes checks to vendors, saying I need more visibility. I want my dashboards etc.
Obviously, I am biased, but CRM is a strategy not a tool to give Mr. Muckety Muck VP of this or that his/her pretty pictures. CRM brings demand generation, sales, and customer service together under a single database structure. If properly implemented, it can add value to our VP but also to those sales reps, service agents, and marketing analysts. Sure if you have 3 employees, implementing a CRM may seem like a daunting task. However, there are a number of free or very low cost systems out there that will provide at a minimum level of basic contact and opportunity management.
Ask yourself…
- How much time am I spending in Excel chewing on sales related data?
- Can my marketing function tell me how successful a given campaign is in terms of leads generated, converted, and total revenue?
- Do I know my pipeline for this week, this month, this year, next year?
- Do I know how well I am servicing my customers?
- Do I consistently meet SLAs?
- Do customer service interactions easily translate into cross-sell up sell opportunities?
I could go on and on with leading indicators but, if the answer is no to many of these questions, a CRM can help. My general experience is that companies wait and only when the pain is great do they finally decide to make a change. This is not an advisable state of mind when buying enterprise software. I always suggest a measured, non-rushed, approach that starts with a sound business strategy. With that in place appropriate supporting tools can be chosen to support the strategy.
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