In order for your business to grow, you need to manage its revenue well. While that sounds simple enough, I’m sure you’d agree that it’s actually a lot easier said than done.
Managing revenue extends so much further than just knowing where your company’s finances are—you need to know what kind of opportunities exist in your pipeline, how you’re attracting leads, if your team is meeting goals, how efficient your business’s processes are, and so much more.
All these different aspects are a part of what we call a “revenue performance management” (or “RPM”) cycle. There are nine steps to an RPM cycle, and we’ve discovered one tool that makes managing those nine steps incredibly simple.
A customer relationship management (CRM) system takes the daunting task of managing your company’s revenue and makes it a much more attainable one.
How can you know if you need a CRM system?
A CRM system is a big investment, so it’s completely understandable that you to want to be absolutely sure a CRM is what your business needs.
Below, we’ve listed some specific challenges and pain points that a CRM can help you overcome. If these situations sound familiar to you, you’re definitely ready.
20 Signs You Need A CRM System
- There’s no clear way to see how your sales team is communicating with leads and clients.
- You have to go around and ask each sales rep who they’re calling and how calls are going to get an idea of how each person is performing and if they’re meeting benchmarks.
- There’s little insight into what kind of conversations are converting leads to customers and what kind of conversations are costing you leads.
- When you lose someone from your sales team, you find that you lose some of your leads, too.
- There isn’t an established way to track or nurture leads, so each sales rep just tracks what they personally deem important.
- You want to save some of your contacts’ data in specific formats that aren’t supported by your main contact management database, so you have to save some in different programs and then make a note of that in your main database with a link to the other documents. This results in data for one lead in at least two different locations.
- There isn’t an easy way to learn what worked well for nurturing a lead and what didn’t.
- When a contact’s record is updated, sometimes the wrong information is changed (and this is realized after the file has been saved).
- Because data is kept on hard drives, in emails, and in random documents or files, data is lost frequently.
- Your hard drive has crashed twice, taking all your data with it.
- Because you have to manually share updated information, people sometimes forget to send those updates to the rest of the team, giving you conflicting versions of data.
- Since you rely on email to share updates about leads and customers, information often gets into the wrong hands.
- In order to see what your leads are doing on your website, you have to refer to email notifications about their activities, and then manually enter every single one into their record.
- You can’t set user permissions in your contact management database, so everyone has access to everything (and can change anything).
- To complete daily tasks, you have to switch between a lot of different programs on your computer. It’s not difficult to do this, but the process takes up time and could definitely be smoother.
- In order to create the reports you need, you have to open several applications and copy and paste their data into something like Excel or PowerPoint. Sometimes you find that you have either missing data or wrong data in reports.
- You timed how long it takes to make simple updates to contacts’ records, share those updates with the team, and make simple reports based on your sales team’s activities—nearly half your work day.
- You’d love to only have to look at one document in order to manage your pipeline. Instead, you have to check in with your sales team to get an idea of how your opportunities look, which deals may close, and which ones you’re probably not getting, and then piece all that information together to try to get an idea of how you’re pipeline looks.
- The process your sales team uses for handing over newly-signed clients for onboarding is pretty clunky, and you’ve found that those new clients sometimes fall between the cracks (to their dismay, and yours).
- You feel like you spend far too much time checking in on your team members, fixing records, scrambling to make reports, and trying to piece together how your business is doing.
Do these situations ring a bell? Unfortunately, this is how many companies function… but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Say Goodbye To The Madness
Instead, invest in a CRM system. A CRM is built for contact management and gives you tools for easy lead tracking, reporting, process optimization, pipeline management, revenue forecasting, and so much more.
And, a CRM will do so much more than just simplify your job—a successfully implemented CRM will make your business more profitable.
A recent ROI study by the International Data Corporation found that companies have seen returns ranging from 16% to well over 1,000% from successfully implemented CRM systems.
If you find that your business is in need of a CRM system, don’t ignore the obvious signs. Make the investment and see how greatly a CRM can impact your business.
To learn even more about how a CRM can benefit your business, download this free white paper: Do You Really Need A Sales CRM?