A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is like a two edged tool; It helps in lead conversion and in customer retention. It is a sales enablement tool that can help your business effectively manage your sales process as well as manage your leads/prospect through various deal stages up to the point where they become your customer.
Any business that desires to achieve tremendous growth must imbibe the CRM culture in its sales reps. It helps your track the performance of your sales reps, monitor and improve sales rep productivity, monitor sales activity to ensure its commensurate with set target. CRM is not a nice to have tool, it is a must have tool for any standard business organization.
7 Setbacks your business is most likely to encounter when you are not using a CRM
1. Unrealistic Sales Revenue Projections or Forecasts:
Primarily, CRM will give you hindsight, insight and foresight into relevant revenue producing statistics for your business; e.g The number outreaches needed to get an appointment, number of contacts (calls, text, email etc) needed to be made with a lead to get a buy in, the average total dollar amount needed to on each deal stage to meet any target you have set and so much more.
You cannot make any serious or accurate revenue forecasts without most of these crucial insights.
2. Disgruntled Sales-reps Exit with Information on Leads:
The absence of CRM in your business is a risk of losing information on your lead if your sales-rep suddenly resign or vacate for other reasons. Trust me, it is not a good experience to have.
Your leads should be treated as important as your customers because they are the seeds needed to build and maintain a sustainable business. That is, your leads are as important as your future in business. Therefore you should not allow their data to be treated with levity. So what do you do? You should mandate your sales-reps to use your company subscribed CRM to record every lead information and their interactions.
Furthermore, if your sales-reps generate the leads, it is important there is an arrangement that involves paying for their efforts. However, mandate them to record every new lead generated, every phone call to/from the lead, every email sent to the lead, every text message sent out, details of every meeting with the lead and deal stages of each lead at every point in time.
3. Inability To detect Sales Opportunity Leakages:
Using CRM, will provide you firsthand information on the deal stages of every lead, expected close date of the business deal with lead and other intricate details. CRM will help you know where your sales reps are struggling and where they are excelling.
For instance, with CRM you might notice that sales-rep A may be doing great in moving a lead from presentation deal stage to negotiation deal stage while sales-rep B always seem to be losing deals at the presentation deal stage. With this info, you can ask sale-rep A to do the B’s presentations with him and teach B how to do effective presentations; these actions will greatly increase Mr B’s closing rate.
Note that, you cannot obtain this sales insights and more like it without using a CRM in your business. That is, without CRM, you are already losing several potential customers as you cannot monitor the effectiveness or strengths of your sales-reps at different deal stages of the customer purchase process.
4. Difficulty in Detecting Sales-reps Irresponsibility:
Absence of CRM in your business may result to irresponsibility finding occasional expression among your sales reps. How will you know the extent to which they followed up a lead? How will you know why several potential deals slipped through the cracks? How will you know if a deal loss was caused by their negligence, un-seriousness or late follow up? How will you know if you lost the deal because there was no follow up at all?
You can check your sales reps and sales teams with a CRM. You will quickly detect irresponsibility and mitigate future damages swiftly before it causes you irreparable loss of your future customers.
5. No Sales Pursuit Accountability:
It is one thing to set sales targets and it is another thing to constantly monitor the activities of your sales team to gauge if their level of activities correlate with the set target. When you set a target, you will need your sales reps to take commensurate activity levels which you should monitor with a CRM.
Moreover, without CRM you will not be able to compare and determine if the volume of sales activity daily taken by your reps match the sales targets you have set for them. With CRM, you will discover fluctuations or inconsistencies in sales activity levels early and know what actions to take to course correct on time so you will stand a chance to meet your target. CRM makes allow you monitor all sales activities from every sales rep or staff relative to their set targets.
6. Unstable Sales Revenue:
To have stable sales revenues, you and your team will have to engage in generating consistent leads for your business. That is, you must maintain consistent and ever increasing levels of sales activity to consistently engage leads and turn them to customers.
Lead generation, nurturing and conversion process has to be continually supervised to ensure that they are in the right proportion and are handled in the appropriate way by the sales reps in order to have stable sales revenue through each month or quarter.
Without CRM, there is almost no way you can monitor or supervise the sales processes involved in maintaining stable sales revenue month after month or quarter after quarter.
7. Unsustainable Business:
Most valuable businesses are those with higher levels of predictable revenues. A sales predictable business is a sustainable business. The less predictable your revenues are, the less sustainable your business is.
For you to achieve predictable revenues, you must have a working system that is constantly bringing in and managing new leads. You can’t achieve that system without CRM.
Customer relationship management will help you monitor and be constantly updated on the number of potential deals you have ,that are at different deal stages and at what velocity they are moving through your sales pipeline.
Which helps you to easily and quickly notice where you can put in timely action to make sure you have enough leads going through your pipeline, as it is required to generate predictable revenues and consequentially a sustainable business.