Does your business need a CRM?

One of the first things almost every business owner asks me is "How do I use a CRM? Am I using it right? Am I using it to its full potential?"
My answer to this is : flip your question. Are you worried that you haven’t used every button in your coffee machine or your washing machine? Then why do you worry about this? The question should rather be "Am I automating my business right? Have I increased my employees’ productivity using the systems I’m using now, or have I only made it more messy?”

So how do you go about deciding to use a CRM?

Here are few questions you could ask yourself

Are you a marketing-driven firm?

Are you a company which depends heavily on marketing to bring in new customers? If yes, then you surely need a CRM right away, so you have better conversions and tracking. However, if marketing is just another function and not so crucial to your kind of business, then you don't need to consider using a CRM.

Do you get lots of new leads everyday?

Does your business get high volume of leads each day, and also from various sources? If yes, then CRM is for you.
Not getting too many leads each day yet, then you may consider using something more straight forward and simpler like Zoho contact manager (https://www.zoho.com/contactmanager/). Later on, when your business grows, you can move to CRM easily.

Is your business all about marketing?

Well! Then grab the CRM right now!

Is your lead conversion process multi-step and/or complicated?

In some businesses, there are several steps to convert a lead into a potential deal. You may have several steps like follow-ups via phone or email or face-to-face, maybe some product demo sessions, or maybe some background checks. We worked with a financial lending firm. They had to do several demos, face-to-face sessions before the lead becomes a prospect. Then once the prospect/potential is in, then they had to do some financial stability tests before closing the deal. CRM really helped them track each stage and set SLAs for flow long a lead can be in one stage before moving to the next, automated alerts, escalation in case of non-compliance and stuff like that. Moving to a CRM helped them reallocate two staff members they had to more crucial, productive tasks, rather than having to manually maintain all this data and teach sales men.

Is deal closure a complicated process?

One company, we worked with, offers sophisticated training programs in niche military skills. For them, if a lead comes in, they have to do several background checks, checking physical fitness, and few other confidential tests before a deal is even considered for closure. For such businesses, where closing a deal involves several steps or is complicated, CRM is the right tool which will help optimize your staff time to more productive work, than just having to maintain this data and track them each day. Also setting up automated reminders, alerts, text messages, custom dashboards tailored to each staff's particular duties and similar things will push your people to stay in track.


The above questions should be sufficient to take the step forward on whether to use CRM for most businesses. However, if you still have questions, don’t hesitate to shoot me an email.