How do you overcome the objection that ‘Excel works fine’ as a CRM tool? Or that the out-of-date copy of a desktop application installed a few years ago by someone on work-experience is too difficult to move away from?
How many times each year does an average customer buy from you? How many times each year does your best customer buy from you? What difference would it make to the profit of the business if you could get 10/20/30/40/50% of your average customers repeat-buying like your best customer?
How much money is wasted with sales reps ‘managing’ their diaries, forgetting to follow-up on calls, and not keeping in regular contact with their clients?
Step back from the business. Think about its value and how it will grow.
Customer relationships, customer data and the management of both are vital to increasing business value and developing business growth.
Your boss requests data. Does he get frustrated when nobody can quickly produce it? Does the lack of visibility of KPIs around sales opportunities and customer service issues impact your boss’s ability to increase sales or customer satisfaction/loyalty? Setting up even a basic CRM system will start to produce business metrics that can be used to make decisions.
Cloud based CRM systems are accessible anywhere – instantly avoiding the pain inaccurate data due to ‘not being connected to the company network’.
Spend some time with your sales reps and end users. Understand areas of lost productivity and how much time they are spending on manual tasks. Work out how much this costs the business in a) unproductive time and b) sales value – if the time was productive.
Save your business time by automating or simply refining existing processes. Spend this saved time on profitable activities.
Today’s world is ‘agile’. Get started with the basics and learn as you go; there’s too much to do and too little time to do it. A basic CRM will let you track your accounts, contacts and activities all in one place. When you realise that you need to be able to do more (like better segmentation, automation, and different sales processes for different products), then make the necessary changes and move up a gear.
Starting small also allows you to start with lower costs – which is great for everyone. So, definitely start small then get bigger!
To discuss how CRM can help your business, give us a call us on 01279 882 290.
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