Why Your Company Needs a CRM

Your company’s lead sales person just quit on the spot. The business needs to reach out to all her accounts and contacts to maintain continuity. Are you panicking on where this wealth of phone numbers and emails might reside? Is your next step to rifle through a stack of business cards, or search through her Outlook contacts? If that’s the case, and this entire scenario gives you a bit of heartburn, it’s time to invest in a customer relationship management (CRM) system.

A CRM is many things, but at its root, is a simple premise building off the scenario above. No single person should ever “own” contact information. It should never be held on one sales person’s phone or desktop. Continuity of business – the if-you-were-hit-by-a-truck-today scenario – requires that contact information reside in a central location.

Additional benefits a CRM will bring to a business include:

Marketing Automation link – A CRM linked to your company’s marketing automation system will archive what campaigns, emails, and invites business contacts were included on. In addition, most will note when they visited your website, and what forms were completed. Basically, the CRM will give you a snapshot of marketing touches with each individual.

Running history of accounts – Many CRMs will archive emails, proposals, and calls to contacts, as well as offer a notes section. They also enable you categorize the account, for instance as a prospect, former customer, etc., as well as note what services (purchases) they bought. The benefit here is if a new sales manager takes over a particular account they can quickly get updated on previous, current, and future sales activity.

Lead management – What happens after a lead is handed off to a sales manager? Many CRMs can codify the process and be built to provide follow-up reminders for specific actions in the sales cycle. The end result is better accounting for leads once they enter your system.

Reporting – A CRM will allow you to run any number of reports from simple customer lists, prospects lists, sales opportunities, etc.

A well-maintained CRM will not only help sales and marketing work in sync, but also will ensure continuity of business. While staff is responsible for accounts and their respective contacts, by housing contact information in one spot, companies set the baseline expectation that the information is solely owned by the company.