How can CRM help a company increase its Sales ?

Not long before when I came across a customer who was skeptical about taking the plunge into CRM and moving in all his 12-year-old Excel Spreadsheets. His reason was simple – it works well, why should I migrate?

This left me with a question – 

If a mid-size company with more than 200 in-premise Servers and Applications doesn’t want to adopt a CRM, imagine how bad the CRM adoption should be for Small and Medium businesses and how much setbacks should it be causing. I couldn’t help but think, how much they are missing out due to this?

This actually made me write 2 blogs. (1) In this post, I have listed a few awesome ways CRM can help you to grow your business. (2) A buyer’s guide on how to choose the best CRM for small businesses.

I sat down with the customer to understand his Business processes and Goals. After analyzing his past data, Apps and Operational Expenses, I explained how much a simple CRM could do for them. Gave them (a) ROI Calculator and (b) Potential areas of Automations. 

A quick glance of it below -

1. Find the right Leads - As per Pardot, “Without a CRM system, 79% of all marketing leads are never converted to sales”. There is no point in getting many leads that don’t convert. Quality of Leads is key to closure. 
2. Track every Lead to make sure it doesn’t go under the crack. With a CRM in place, every communication to a potential lead can be tracked. customers may be contacting you on a range of different platforms including phone, email, or social media — asking questions, following up on orders, etc. Without a common platform for customer interactions, communications can be missed or lost in the flood of information — leading to a slow or unsatisfactory response. You could also score a particular Lead based on their activities. With clear Activity History, any Sales guy can pick up from where the other one had left. 
3. Help the field Sales folks by enabling them with mobility. Enabling them with mobility helps them to enter notes and specify dollar value and track pipelines, Opportunity stages etc. from their mobiles itself. 
   • This helps speeding up and optimizing their time. 
   • Also know how much they’ve achieved vs target
   • Can always be on the go and not have to spend time in a coffee shop entering details.
4. Offer Better Customer Insights. More administration means less time for everything else. An active sales team can generate a flood of data. Reps are out on the road talking to customers, meeting prospects, and finding out valuable information – but all too often this information gets stored in handwritten notes, laptops, or inside the heads of your salespeople. The key insights get lost. A CRM is known to increase customer retention by 27%. 
5. Power of cloud – If Servers and Apps are hosted in-premise, cost to run the IT team could be huge. Not to forget the custom patch upgrades and associated downtimes. Cloud takes away all these issues. There is literally no downtime, patch upgrades are also handled by the OEM. All we need to do is use the system and pay for what we’ve used.
6. How much an Excel can cost? Nothing, correct? Apparently, it costs a lot. University of Hawaii found that 88% of MS Excel Spreadsheet contain some kind of errors. You can read more on - Why Excel Sheets are Bad for your Business?

Managing your data becomes the biggest pain point after the organization reaches a certain size. It is best to have a Tool in place when you are small, to help address data issues in the future. A simple CRM can do that for you. As you scale up it doesn’t break the bank to improve the way your data is organized. 

It also Reduces the Task of Manual Data Entry, Improves Work Efficiency, Provides Valuable Business Insight, Helps to Segment & Identify Your Best Accounts. This list doesn’t End.

As on today my customer’s Sales pipelines have increased by 59% and Sales has gone up by 34%. 

Talk to a CRM consultant near you to understand how you can adopt the right CRM for your Organization.