Why do I need a CRM?

Introduction

Considering you are on this page, titled "Why do I need a CRM?" - It's a safe bet to assume you are still unsure if you should invest in a CRM.

If you are unfamiliar with CRM, we'd recommend taking a look at our “What is a CRM?” page to give you an insight into what CRM means and the idea behind it.

Have a read below to experience some of the problems you might face when you avoid using a CRM.

The benefits

We've covered some of the issues that you can experience when you don't use CRM software, let's look at the benefits.

We're sure you'll agree - customer information is one of the top priorities for any business. If a customer phones up asking where their order is - you need to know the order they're talking about. What about if they ask why a piece of work hasn't been completed - you should be able to find out.

A simple example of this is this: Your customer comes in for a meeting, you ask them which drink they'd like, and they reply "coffee" the obvious follow up question is - how do you take it? For arguments sake, let's say milk with two sugars.

Fast forward one month, they come in for another meeting, this time however, when you ask, "Would you like a drink?" and they reply "coffee" - instead of asking "how do you take it?", you can say - "It's white with two sugars, right?".

Not only are they going to feel welcomed and valued, but they also now think you've remembered their drink choice. A small gesture can mean so much - it makes us feel warm inside!

Another key part of any business is making money, which is why a CRM is perfect for manging these sales - as opposed to a spreadsheet. With a spreadsheet you'd run into the problems mentioned previously, locked spreadsheets or lost files.

However, working on a sale with a CRM means you can easily add the company and person you are talking too. Now you have them added, you can create a sale linked against them. That not only means you can see the status of your opportunity at a glance, but it will also be added to your pipeline so you can see exactly how much your estimated income will be.

Many CRMs - such as Clockwork CRM - come with permissions. This means you can restrict access from people who don't need to see everything. This solves the problem of somebody picking up your spreadsheet and running off with it, you can restrict access so only a select few people can export data from the system.

As we mentioned in the previous section - backups are very important, if you lost your data, that's your whole business down the can! Using a cloud based CRM solves this problem, as it will be regularly backed up for you, without you having to worry about it. This is exactly how Clockwork CRM works, we take regular backups, so just in case the worst should ever happen, we can easily restore your data.

Marketing functionality such as bulk emailing and document creation is included with lots of CRMs but some charge a large premium for using it.

Using a CRM to send bulk emails means the email will automatically be linked against the contact you are sending it too. Not only does this let you go back through their history to see if they've received emails before, but it can also let you see if they opened the email or clicked any of the links within it.