1) It allows you to record your leads to sales process

Leads can come from anywhere at any time. It is important that they are kept track of, and more so, you are keeping track of where they are coming from. Have you undertaken a Marketing campaign which has drawn traffic to your website contact form? Have you been partaking in Facebook ads? Pay per Click ads? Many companies spend on marketing but forget (or are unable to) quantify how much business is a product of that strategy! Use a CRM system to break the boundary of not understanding whether your marketing is working!

Also, being able to quantify how long it takes from a lead to become a sale (contact) on average allows streamlining of the sales process! If you as a company, are converting leads to sales within 4 weeks on average, yet you understand in your industry it should not take that long; starting to analyse at which point you are losing that time is important! Are sales taking too long for an initial client call? Are clients taking too long to get information across to your company – if so, how can you minimise this?! Getting data is great, however, the system will allow you to understand that data to make improvements to your internal processes!

2) Track all customer interactions

When employees are on annual leave, it can sometimes be dreaded for colleagues or business owners. But why? It is dreaded as people are worried that they ‘don’t know where the work is up to’! If I had a penny for the number of times, I have heard customers say this. This however shows a lack of internal processes. If all calls and emails (automatically) are tracked in the system, ANYONE (with the correct permissions) is able to take that project right from where it was left off. They are able to see the correspondence between their colleague and customer, diminishing the reliance business owners have on certain employees as they come directly to the system, not just mailboxes.

3) Keeping data up to date

We all know, in a business, once of the most important aspects of a business is the data we hold. The information we have on our customers, and the level of detail we have on their purchasing habits (from services to products). Therefore, the fear of people leaving the company and nobody else knows where they stand with a project is horrendous! The contacts weren’t updated, or important contacts were added to the system, you’re not sure whether invoices have been sent to the customer, you don’t know if a quote has been accepted. These are all fearful factors when running a business, however, by utilising a system and making it a process to store this data as it is helpful, quick and easy, you are eliminating those risks!