Are you struggling to keep tabs on an ever-increasing number of leads as your small business grows? Congratulations! Are opportunities falling through the cracks because you can’t keep up without a CRM for your SMB? Uh oh!
As small businesses grow into medium-sized companies, the growing pains can range from annoying to uncomfortable to downright overwhelming. A small business can operate on quick tools or home-grown solutions for only so long.
At some point you will want to consider investing in a full-fledged Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
What is a CRM? It’s a centralized tool to help you track interactions with leads as they step through your sales process. A CRM can help you keep tabs of all the moving pieces of multiple leads, making sure no steps are missed in the process.
Here are 5 signs that you might be ready to invest in a CRM for your SMB:
1. You have more than one salesperson
When it’s just one person handling the leads and opportunities, they already know what’s going on in each one. They’ve got everything in their head and don’t have to worry about collaborating with someone else.
As your sales team grows to two or three (or more) people, you might find yourself stumbling over each other a bit. This is particularly true if you’re using a shared email or general phone number for all incoming leads.
Tell-tale growing pains include:
- Calling a lead only to discover that your coworker already contacted them
- Giving a different quote than they’ve already received from someone else on your team
- Failing to respond to someone because you and your coworker both assumed the other was taking charge
- Emailing an unhappy client, unaware that they’re currently struggling through a situation with another member of the team
2. You have a lengthy sales cycle
Similar to having more than one sales person, having a lengthy sales cycle can contribute to missed timelines and forgotten details. After all, it’s hard to remember everything you said to a prospect last week, much less six months ago.
A lengthy (or complex) sales cycle might look like any of the following:
- It takes more than six months to close a deal.
- What you sell is considered a “low urgency” solution or product.
- Multiple decision makers are involved.
- You have multiple rounds of demos before you make the sale.
- You’re often waiting weeks for the customer to make their final decision.
While none of these factors are necessarily damaging, having a longer sales cycle simply means that you have to retain information for each potential client much longer. Having a singular space to store those customer interactions, quotes and more can go a long way in catching you up to speed when the prospect is ready to reengage.
3. You’re losing deals because you didn’t follow up
A lot of factors go into winning or losing a deal, and some are out of your hands. A lack of follow up, however, is something you can fix.
When you start losing multiple deals because you are not able to follow up in a timely manner, it’s either time to hire another sales person or invest in a CRM solution that can help your SMB better manage the pipeline.
Here are several telltale signs that you’re dropping the ball needlessly due to growing pains:
- You run across an old lead in your Inbox and realize you never responded.
- You call a lead back, only to have them say they already went with someone else.
- You have multiple messages from the same person, on the same subject, getting more and more disgruntled and short.
- A prospect says they went with someone else because you didn’t seem to have time for them.
- You find yourself “winging it” far too often on those all-important sales meetings or demos.
4. You can’t keep track of all your customer interactions
Similarly, if you’re struggling to keep track of all your customer interactions, you might benefit from a CRM solution.
Growing pains in this area can show up in the form of:
- Multiple spreadsheets with outdated contact information
- Sticky notes all over the office with important tidbits of conversations
- Upset customers who say you never responded to them
- Emails repeatedly bouncing because you forgot to update an email address
- Pricing discrepancies because you can’t find where you documented the original quote
5. You’re making decisions based solely on instinct
Don’t get us wrong — The best salespeople have great instincts and do know when to rely on those gut feelings. They’ve generally worked long hours to gain the experience necessary to understand instinctively what to do next for a lead.
However, as the company grows, working by instinct can sometimes hamper business. Do these growing pains sound familiar?
- Your main salesperson is home sick, but no one else knows his or her “gut instinct” process well enough to take over.
- You rely heavily on instinct and struggle to pass on your skills to new sales team members.
- When the owner asks for projections, you feel like you’re pulling a number out of a hat.
- You fall short of either sales quota or inventory on hand because you’re constantly guessing at what’s coming in this month.
- You don’t actually know why you won the deals you did last year.
If any of these signs resonate with you, then your company might benefit from implementing a CRM solution that can help you better manage your leads and streamline your sales process. We’d be happy to help you evaluate whether Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales would be a good CRM for your SMB. Contact us to day to set up an intro call!
