How do I know if I need CRM software?

1. Your customer information is disorganized 

An Excel here, a Word there, emails between clients and employees that have no order being forwarded all over the company, notes in a notebook that mysteriously disappeared when you needed it, or in an accident, office or home, it got smudged and you can't read anything anymore, nothing shows up when you need it If any of these items sound familiar, chances are you need a CRM. 

An organized workspace results in a more organized mind and a more productive team. Having papers and files all over the place without order doesn't work, especially if your customer volume has increased considerably and with it your sales team. Growth often means more disorder, which is why it is so important that in order to keep up with the pace of growth, it is possible to establish an order within the same company that works for everyone. 

CRM helps you to align sales, marketing and customer service, all customer information in one place. The emails that were sent, if there were meetings, the notes from those meetings and the agreements that were reached. 

2. Disconnect within the sales team 

We are not all the same and our ways of varying are very different, when sales teams grow more people come in and expecting them to be homogeneous is a mistake. Not everyone has the same type of organization, leaving the organization to each person implies that there can be errors within what each person considers the best method of organization or the means by which it is done. 

For example, a person 'x' thinks that the best way to organize everything is in a Word document, while 'y' considers that it is in an Excel, then each one organizes his own information in this type of documents. Or there will be the person who prefers to write everything down in a notebook, or the person who digitalizes everything. 

Having the picture clear and if you are familiar with the situation, I want to explain how CRM helps you: it is a centralized source of information, to which everyone has access at all times, but additionally if someone has to take someone else's customer, you do not have to go to that person to explain the whole process from 0 and everything is organized in a friendly and intuitive way for everyone to understand. 

3. You don't know what's going on with your leads

Your leads are the first part of a conversion funnel, which leads to prospects and finally to customers. However, when a lead appears your team effectively calls them, but they don't know what happened to that potential customer. In other words, a person 'y' from the team attended to the lead, but it was 'x' who brought it in, and at the end of the day no one knows what happened to that lead. You don't have a structure in place to help you identify, for example, why those leads didn't become customers and who among them did. 

There may be a multitude of other cases where there is no concrete record of what happened to those customers and your conversion funnel is unclear. Why is it important to keep this information in mind? Because it serves to make sales prospections and with it, the possible profits that will be received in a certain period of time. 

The CRM solves this because you can effectively visualize what is happening with the leads at all times, update the state in which they are, where they came from and how they are becoming customers. Above all, it can help you convert more leads into prospects and potential customers, because you understand how it works and together with marketing and sales alignment, you get better prospects that will convert into leads. 

4. Your team is wasting time on manual tasks

In theory, all teams should function like the hands of the clock: all well matched and perfectly aligned. But the reality is not always like that, teams are human and we must consider that humans are variable, our personal circumstances affect our work and performance. This is why, if there is too much manual task load that could be automated, there is a risk of errors. 

Simple errors can turn into problems with manual tasks, for example, having a double record of a customer and therefore not being able to follow up on it, which means that you lose time with that customer by going back to it because the record you are looking at is not the updated one. Or cases such as the information was not updated and so you have to go back and collect all the information to update it. 

Other ways that there are ways that time is not being put to good use include: 

• Having to search for records in a giant Excel 
• Searching for a customer's entire communications history. 
• Updating columns and formats because they no longer work. 
• Updating customer records manually. 

How does CRM help you with this? CRM has automations for marketing, sales and customer service, so your team can focus on being truly productive, without updating lengthy documents and manually reporting all the time what happened with the prospect, or answering emails about it. In short: be more productive, attract new customers and close business. 

5. Your customers don't receive a personalized experience 

Yes, you probably got the customer, but are you able to retain them? In the age of personalization, your customers expect more in terms of the service they receive and the attention they are given. It is now a minimum that you create a customized experience to the unmet needs that your customer has and that your product will solve. You cannot maintain a single script to deal with all sales processes. 

You have to think of it this way, even if you need a pair of pants, you are not going to buy it if it is not your size, no matter how much you need it and how much you love the design. The same thing happens with products, they may need your product or service, they really like what you offer, but they feel it is not right for them because the sales experience did not explain how it works for THEM. 

Within the sales experience with your team, they were told about the amazing benefits your product or service brings them, but not how it will solve the problems they have and how it will supply the reasons why they are requiring the service or product you are offering. 

The way CRM helps you with this is by offering a unique record of each customer, whether it's a person or a company, or records of companies and the people they communicate with within that company. It is a unique record of each person, it allows you to see everything that has happened in the buying process, customize what is most important to have on hand and be able to offer a tailored experience. This way your customer will feel how important and special they are to the company. 

6. You want to scale your business 

When you start a business, you always dream of the moment when it will grow and become big, and the time has come. But growing involves the typical growing pains, known as growth pains, growing with the team, handling a larger number of clients and the operation growing, are growing pains. Now you have to train more people, adapt to the new influx of leads, prospects and customers, and also verify that the product or service you offer continues to be delivered with the best possible quality. 

This is perhaps one of the best reasons to acquire a CRM, because you are visualizing a future and preventing possible problems that may arise, you understand that you need a tool to manage growth and keep pain growths as low as possible. Of course, there will be some pain growths, especially at the time of implementation, but in the long run it is a wise decision. 

But how does CRM work in this case, the way it works is that there comes a point in the business where you can't track inbound leads because the amount of volume is greater than you can process manually. The CRM manages that lead tracking and helps you keep track of all these potential leads to choose the best ones for your business. 

Why does this happen and is it essential to have a CRM? It can happen in many ways but in general humans cannot process too much information effectively without it being susceptible to errors, and as we saw above errors can cause significant loss of time. 

Why does this happen and is it essential to have a CRM? It can happen in many ways but in general humans cannot process too much information effectively, without it being susceptible to errors, and as we saw above errors can cause significant loss of time and resources within the same organization that in the long run can mean a greater loss. 

Although keeping an existing customer is much cheaper than bringing in a new one, this does not mean that you should not follow up with new customers, especially when you are looking to keep growing your business. The CRM you purchase will help you follow up with prospects and create growth strategies for you to use within your business. 

7. Your customers are not satisfied with the service 

This reason is worrying, your customers should be the center of your business, ultimately they are the reason why you created the company, why it exists. Remember the reason why you started the company, you saw a need that existed in the market and you wanted to supply it, that is the reason for being. If you are not being able to meet that need completely and satisfactorily, your company loses that reason for being, especially if it is the product or service you provide.   

Now, if your customers are complaining that they don't like the service you are providing them, either in sales or after-sales, it is equally worrying. Something very important to consider is why this is happening: is what they are offered when they have their first contact with marketing not the same as what they are told in sales? Did sales promise a different product or service than what was delivered? Did they present expectations that could not be met or were unrealistic? Did customer service fail to solve the problem?

It could be any of these, or a combination of some or all of them. With CRM these problems are solved in the following way: by communicating. Not with emails, not with meetings, not with memos, but because everyone has access to the same information and the flow of communication is constant, even if teams are not talking to each other, they are aligned and on the same page. Sales knows what marketing said, customer service knows what sales said, and they all feed back to each other so that the customer leaves with the best possible product experience. 

Did any of these reasons resonate with you? Are these issues resonating with you or do you have others? Let us know in the comments! If you want to learn more about CRM check out this blog post, it may help clear up any doubts you have.