FAQ

What is CRM?

CRM (customer relationship management) lets you store and manage prospect and customer information, like contact info, accounts, leads, and sales opportunities, in one central location. But as you continue to read more below, you’ll discover that it’s not just a fancy contact list. It’s how a CRM solution uses that customer info that makes it one of the most valuable, game-changing pieces of business technology available to a small business.

How can CRM help me to make more sales?

A CRM system gives you a quick way to score and route leads, track opportunities and activities, and gain visibility into deal stages and business health for both prospects and customers. And it’s literally a record of your business’ ongoing relationship with those contacts, whether they’re a customer, or if you’re trying to turn them into a customer. The details of that record can contain everything from call logs, call notes, deal conversations, and quotes, to shared files that are relevant to the customer’s needs, and more. So now anyone with access to the record can speak to the customer with confidence. Additionally, you can set it up to create daily to-do lists, schedule call alerts, trigger emails, and more. Most companies using a CRM solution find their deal cycles shortened considerably.

Can a CRM solution help me find more leads?

The right CRM solution can give you access to contact databases that can be filtered to find your ideal prospects and decision makers within a company, provide social data on those contacts, and deliver insights into what customers are talking about. This makes territory planning and white space analysis easier as well.

A complete CRM solution also helps companies run and track marketing campaigns, including marketing communication creation and delivery automation. It can even help create forms for lead capture and track performance. And for those leads that are not sales ready, you can even automatically put them in a nurture track so that when you do call, they are more likely to buy.

How is CRM going to save me time?

A huge benefit of CRM is automating routine — yet time-sapping — tasks, which saves countless hours. This allows more time for selling. Take for example a marketing effort, one in which you want to send out an email follow-up. With a good CRM solution, you don’t have to remember which leads you want to target. You can simply create some rules around your leads and automate the marketing effort, like email campaigns and lead capture, so leads are quickly routed to reps to be either followed up with or nurtured. Email templates that can be created in the CRM solution ensure you don’t have to repeat the work or even cut and paste.

The result? You can jump on opportunities more quickly and close more deals, faster. CRM also enables you to take data like pipeline size or deal size and create dashboards to help you make informed decisions at a glance. You can quickly check in on the health of deals, revenues, and more.

Does CRM help my teams work better together?

A CRM solution makes the same information accessible companywide. This means that almost any customer-focused activity can be better and more easily coordinated — not just within departments, but across departments, from sales to customer service. Also, because account data and activity is updated in real time, every team member — no matter where they are and what they’re working on — is always working with up-to-the-minute information on customers and your company’s interactions with them, like stages in the sales cycle, service issues, or order status.

Salesforce makes collaboration between teams even easier by including Chatter, a social network designed for business productivity that allows team members to share files, find experts, and work on projects to help every employee do more with less.

How do I know if my  business need CRM?

If you’re still not sure if your small business would benefit from CRM, below are some clues that can help you in your decision.

Signs you need CRM
If anything on this short checklist sounds familiar, CRM might be worth exploring to help your business find, win, and keep customers more efficiently.

• You have teams that work closely together, even when not actually together
• Your sales teams are often on the road
• You are unable to quickly find customer data to make decisions fast
• You feel deals are falling through the cracks because you’re managing things in spreadsheets and notebooks
• You have a patchwork of apps that you call CRM but they are not really connected on top of a single database or “system of record”
• Your business is growing more quickly than you feel ready for
• You know that your business’ customer service experience is lacking or you are losing more customers because of service issues than you’d like
• You or your IT department is buried with maintenance requests