We’ve met a few business owners that ask us what we mean by a CRM. Working in this space, we assumed that everyone knows what a CRM is. So if you’ve been wondering about what is a CRM and how it can help you grow your business, then read on!
What is a CRM?
A CRM is an acronym for Customer Relationship Management. It is a system for managing and nurturing your customer relationships.
Even Wikipedia has a definition for CRM.
When you start your business, you’re probably managing your customer relationships via emails or inside your Accounting software. But as your business grows, your needs will change and you will need to start thinking about signing up to a CRM system that helps you manage ALL your customers in a central place.
For example, your team will want to know more about your prospects and leads. They will want to reach out to them and need to know how to do that. If you have a Sales Manager on your team, they will want to access all the sales reports to understand the pipeline of new business and the overall sales cycle.
This makes it easier for your customers to deal with your company.
How do you know when to transition to a CRM system?
Sometimes we meet B2B clients, who’ve managed to centralise their clientele into a spreadsheet and that worked for them for a bit. Once their organisation became complex, they needed the ability to keep track of their sales staff. While the spreadsheet works fine for a while, at some point, you will outgrow it and will need to move to a dedicated paid platform.
You will know when to transition to a paid CRM system when:
- It becomes hard to manage all your customer data in a “flat” structure. You will want to visualise the data somehow in the forms of charts that can show you how a lead converted into a customer.
- If you have a complex spreadsheet, it will become harder for your team to find raw data as it’s scattered across various other platforms and “sheets”.
- You will want to know who your leads are when a sales staff member exits your company. You’d want to know where to pick up from where they left off.
- Also communication with customers becomes harder as you grow, and you will need a dedicated platform that will help you nurture leads automatically saving you time and money in the long run.
These days, there are hundreds of software companies that specialise in CRMs.
The largest one is Salesforce. This CRM is widely used by large companies, however we’ve assisted smaller businesses with Salesforce’s small business product called Salesforce Essentials and connected it with ActiveCampaign to create powerful nurture sequences, on a budget!
The technology these days has enabled us to create our own custom solutions that work around your business. So for example if there are specific features that you like in one CRM platform, we can connect it to work with other platforms. If you’re looking for a bespoke solution, you can reach out to us for a quick chat – here.
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Fun Fact
What are the origins of the CRM?
Before anyone invented the term CRM (Customer Relationship Management), Tiffany & Co, the famous luxury jewellery shop, had been collecting individual purchase data from their customers since 1956. You can learn more about it here.
Jovana Vujnic
Head Honcho | Marketing Automation Expert | Evil Twin Sister
Jovana is the Founder of Bumper Leads - a marketing automation agency that helps businesses simplify and automate their sales and marketing systems to help them save time and money.
She is a former body builder turned fast food junkie turned automation geek.
When she is not watching Cobra Kai on Netflix, she shares interesting marketing advice on our podcast called Marketing Automation Made Simple. This is where she helps overwhelmed business owners build smart marketing growth systems so they feel excited and in control of growing their businesses.
You can always follow her on social media to see what she's up to.