What Kind of Idiot Runs a Business without a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System?
IF business owner = idiot WHERE business DOES NOT HAVE CRM
THEN 80% OF business owners MUST BE idiots.
Most small businesses do not employ a CRM. Many "have one" but don't use it. I'm not saying it's easy. But, it's necessary for any small business that wants to be bigger or more profitable someday.
Here's a great list of questions about CRM that you should ask yourself.
- Do you know who your most profitable customers are, and what they purchase?
- Are you aware of the current sales opportunities your sales team is working on?
- Do you know which opportunities are at the beginning, middle, or end of your sales process?
- Can you list the marketing campaigns that generated revenue and which ones failed?
- Do you know the reason for the successes? How about the failures?
- Employees only need to go to a single database for all business information, right?
- Employees never have to enter the same information in more than one database or spreadsheet, eh?
- Do you provide your sales people with current customer account status to avoid wasted time?
- Can you easily control information access for each employee?
- Do you have a trail of: Communications with your clients, problems reported, and solutions implemented?
Whether you use Sage CRM, Salesforce.com, Microsoft CRM, Landslide, Zoho, or Sugar CRM, it doesn't really matter. You need to start implementing.