A few spreadsheets and rules of thumb may do just fine, but what happens when business starts to boom and you need to get organized?
At some point, your company will need to implement some kind of customer contact management system (another way of saying CRM), that’s more organized and streamlined than a mass of spreadsheets. And such a migration of contacts and their associated data, could be painful if the decision has been put off a few too many months, or even years.
At its core, a CRM is not just useful to large enterprise companies -- it’s essential for B2B businesses of all sizes.
Did you know that 75% of B2B sales managers say that using a CRM helps to drive and increase sales? Or that CRM systems improve customer retention by 27%? It’s hard to argue with numbers like that.
So, let’s start at the beginning ... What is a CRM?
CRM refers to software that helps companies track interactions with their future and current customers.
The goal of implementing a CRM is to create a system that your sales and marketing teams can use to more efficiently and effectively interact with prospects or customers.
Marketing will often use a CRM to ensure that they’re passing the right leads to their sales team -- a key aspect of developing a strong relationship with the sales team.
Sales people utilize the CRM in a different way. They use it to source prospective customers, communicate with them, and track their interactions over time. Having the entire prospect history in one place increases their efficiency and improves their productivity. For instance, salespeople using a CRM won’t have to hunt through their email to remember where a conversation left off.
Which companies benefit from using a CRM?
The short answer is that any company who seeks to maintain a relationship with their customers can benefit from using a CRM system. To get a little bit more specific, there are two groups of companies that often see the most benefit:
» B2B companies that typically need to track marketing leads, the conversion process and customers across long sales cycles and through upgrade paths (e.g., a manufacturer, a software / technology company, a professional services firm, a recruiting firm)
» Considered purchase B2C companies (e.g., a jeweler, a landscaping service, a pool company, or a realtor.)
That being said, there are a lot of companies who don’t fit the above two profiles, but still find value in using a CRM system. Another way to understand whether or not a CRM system can help your business, is to think about the challenges that CRM systems aim to solve - these are the typical ones for B2B companies:
» Do you have a need for maintaining a central list of information on your leads and customers?
» Does this information live in many different places in sales and marketing silos?
» Are your customers regularly interfacing with multiple people on your team?
» How does everyone keep track of where the conversation with any one customer left off?
» Do you struggle to understand the productivity of your sales team?
» Does your sales team follow a unstructured sales process?
» Do you want to measure and track the sales funnel and generate reports for management?
If you answered yes to any one or more of the above questions, chances are your business could benefit from a CRM system to start doing Inbound Sales.
In Part 2 of this CRM blog series we will review the benefits of a B2B company using a CRM.
THE BRIT AGENCY is a B2B Inbound Marketing Agency providing Inbound Marketing, Inbound Website Design and Inbound Sales services to companies around the world. We're focused on growing website traffic, qualified leads and sales, using the Inbound lead generation and marketing automation process.
THE BRIT AGENCY is a certified Gold Tier Hubspot Partner, a HubSpot COS certified Inbound Website Design Agency, a Shopify eCommerce Partner, and a certified "Google Badged Agency Partner". We have offices in Toronto and Barrie, Canada, and Salisbury, UK.
