There’s Just No Point As Your Business Is Too Small
Yes, there’s only you (or perhaps just a few people) in the business and there’s little point in having a CRM because you’re just too small. But hang on, small businesses generate data. And when you think about it, they generate quite a lot. So, you don’t have the luxury of a big sales team, but you do have to juggle marketing, sales, operations and finance every day. All the things that big businesses do, you do with a shoestring workforce.
When you think about how thinly you spread yourself across the different functions of your business, it’s almost absurd to think that there are no systems out there designed to make your life easier.
If I step back and look at myself. I run a small business. In a typical day like today, I live on my computer using AdWords, Analytics, WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, HootSuite, Salesforce, Kashflow, Answer, Outlook, Skype, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, iCal and Terminal. And I’m writing a blog. And that’s before I’ve picked up my phone to make some calls. Plus, my desk still manages to stay cluttered with notes and to-do lists! There’s a lot going on.
What takes the edge off my madness is knowing that at the press of a button in Salesforce, I can see who I need to call today. At the press of another button I can see how many leads I’ve generated from my AdWords, Twitter and other activities. I can see how much money the business made this month, last month and what I need to do so that next month we reach the target. There are probably quite a lot of businesses much bigger than mine that can’t do that. I can because I’m small, I know my business inside out and I like to stay in control.
So, thinking about it – the smaller the business is, the easier it is to get started with a CRM because a) it takes some of the stress away with remembering all the information a small business owner/manager needs to remember and b) as the business grows you’re simply scaling a system that already works.
Maybe? What do you think?
It’s Just Too Much Hassle As It’s Difficult To Use
Definitely yes. These CRM things are big and beastly with loads of buttons and widgets and scary forms to fill in. How on earth do you make that work in your business? I completely agree. When I first looked at Salesforce CRM (several years ago now), I was completely flummoxed by how I was going to get my business (a small print company at the time) to work with what Salesforce considered to be the ‘right’ way of running a sales process. The default settings told me that I needed to track Prospecting, Qualification, Needs Analysis, Value Proposition, Id. Decision Makers, Perception Analysis, Proposal/Price Quote, Negotiation/Review. I didn’t even know what half of those meant and certainly not in the context of someone buying a small amount of printed marketing material. I imagine it would be exactly the same for you.
In fact, I know it is. A client I visited less than a week ago was trying to make their business (software sales) work with the exact same sales process stages – 5 years after I’d first got stuck with them! For me, what turned Salesforce from something of a hassle to something that really started working for the business was to throw away the ‘standard’ setup and build it up for my business. So, for our software sales friends, we got rid of all the superfluous information that they don’t need to track and set the stages to be: First Meeting Arranged, First Meeting Held, Awaiting Proposal, Proposal Sent, Negotiating/Review. Plus, we added in some details about tracking prospective clients holding a trial whilst the sales process progresses.
After stripping back a CRM to basics and rebuilding for your business, it’s a lot less difficult to use because it makes a lot more sense. It’s talking your language and working the way you work.
So, thinking about it – a CRM that’s difficult for you to use, is difficult because it just is. If you strip it back and build it up so that it makes sense for your business you could make it a lot easier to use and deliver you a lot more value.
Maybe? What do you think?
It’s Just Too Expensive And You Have No Budget
Budget – yes now there’s an awkward question. Different CRM systems have different price points with different levels of functionality and different ways to access. It’s a bit of a minefield. You can pay anything from zero upwards. So, you can put a CRM in that costs you nothing. Zip, no cost at all. But does it do what your business needs it to do? Does it help? Does it assist you in getting control of your data and helping you convert more business? If it doesn’t then the cost is a lot more than zero. It’s costing you money in lost revenue. And the mad thing is that it could be costing you thousands or tens of thousands in lost revenue when putting in place a simple system could cost you a lot less.
Let me explain using Salesforce CRM as an example (yes, we’re partners with Salesforce and most experienced with that CRM, but the principle applies more broadly). Salesforce have a CRM price point at £3/$5 per user per month and one at £85/$125 per user per month. That’s a massive price difference – paying about £100/$150 for 3 users for a year vs £3,000/$4,500. And the difference to the business can be massive too – from just holding onto contact information and keeping a log of emails and contacts, to automatically prompting of when a client is about to lapse, highlighting an upsell opportunity for a client, showing which products and services are selling at which times of year across different market segments, which price points are generating the most profit.
I can honestly say that I was sceptical of Salesforce.com’s pricing strategy and the ‘recommended’ or ‘most popular’ edition flag on their Enterprise Edition solution. I initially avoided it because I “had no budget”. Now, having implemented it in a number of businesses – editions below Enterprise just don’t deliver that level of automation that modern businesses need and demand. My CRM has won me more business because it didn’t allow me to drop the ball.* If you were losing, say 2-3% of your revenue through lost opportunities – how much would that be worth? That might be a good starting point for deciding how much to consider spending on a CRM – because it should at the very least help you improve by that amount.
So, thinking about it – if you have no budget for CRM you’ve probably not looked at how it can add value to your business. Is it a cost? Yes. Is it an investment? Yes. It’s a cost if you install it and don’t set it up and use it properly. It’s an investment if you do and you leverage it to make more money.
Maybe? What do you think?
* OK, so I’ll do a separate post on data entry – because you can’t be reminded to do something if you don’t tell your CRM in the first place – the system is driven by human input!
“Tell me what you think – I’d love to hear your comments. Just post below and share.”
Matthew Day
Salesforce Solutions Director
[email protected] Follow @CRMSuperStars
