Information is King - where is your CRM?

In the digital age, digital information is king. Pretty obvious really. Or is it? Do business owners and managers realise this?

From some discussions I've had, it seems not. Some people just don't seem to 'get it'. They store email addresses and phone numbers into their contacts in Outlook, Gmail or on their phones but that's it. Opportunities are tracked via notes or tasks with no real structure and no game plan on how to close the deal. That may be all well and good if you have opportunities coming out the wazoo but in a tight market, you need to be smarter than that.

So what will a CRM solution give you that you can't just do in Outlook? Plenty is the answer. I'll elaborate.

1. The most obvious thing is that it will give you the ability to create, store, view and sort your opportunities in a consistent and structured manner. This will make them easy to search or browse and therefore easier to follow up on (and close). You will also keep all documentation relating to the opportunity in this single repository - quotes, build specs, etc. 
2. The ability to put a dollar figure on your potential future business. It's all well and good to think you have plenty of business in the pipeline but how can you measure it? Most CRM solutions will give you some kind of dashboard that will tell you exactly what is in the pipeline, and if you have it set up correctly in the first place, which opportunities have the highest probability of closing. The most likely opportunities will then float to the top and these are the ones you will want to concentrate on.
3. By having your opportunities in the one system - and again making sure that system is set up correctly - you can make sure that all the members of your sales team are following the same procedures when working a deal, by programmatically presenting the next step as the previous one is completed.
4. Following on from this, most CRMs will give you the ability to automate parts of the process. For example, if you have a process that says when you get a new lead, you send them a welcome pack on day one, a link to some relevant info on your web site on day two, then arrange a meeting on day three, you can often automate this whole process. That's a far more efficient way of managing leads, not to mention removing the possibility of a human forgetting a step.

CRM solutions need not be expensive these days, with many hosted in the cloud and available for a nominal monthly fee per user. That being the case, there is no real excuse not to have one. If you aren't using a CRM solution in your business, why not?