This Blog is based my 30 years of business experience and on the dozens of free workshops I’ve done over the past 3 years with SCORE Orange County
Are you a business owner or manager today? Have you heard of CRM tools but don’t know much about them or why someone might need them?
The following series is designed for you!
Do you have customers or are you going to have customers? As I pointed out in my recent webinar in partnership with the US Small Business Administration and Microsoft, if you have customers or are going to have them, then why wouldn’t you have a tool to help you manage your relationship with those folks??
Why else do you need a CRM tool? Well, let’s ask ourselves, who really owns your customer information? If you don’t have a centralized place to track and manage that data who’s really owns it? If a team member can walk out your door with any of that data, can they take it down the street to your competition and use it there? If so, don’t they really own it? If you’ve got customer info sitting on post-it notes, business cards or notebooks how secure is it and what value is it adding to your organization?
By putting that information in a CRM solution we can bring our clients to the heart of our business! We can manage the contacts that are taking place. We can know our data is secure and backed up with only authorized users having the ability to extract any or all of it.
Now that we’ve got the data all in one place, how can we quickly start to improve our Sales and drive value from it?
Let’s start by “cloning” your best salesperson! We can do this by looking at the process they use to be successful and replicating it for the other people on your team.
It’s important to think about how to make your sales process repeatable. Think of it like an assembly line. That said, it can be a simple as 3 steps…something like “Lead-Prospect-Close” or something much more complicated that leverages the internal workflow capabilities of CRM
The first step is just get going! At PartnerSource Solutions we can get you started with a free 30-day trial of CRM and assist you further by working with you to understand your needs and how we can serve you.
In our next article we’ll focus on how Customer Service can benefit from having a CRM tool.
This post was written by Eric Klauss, Partner – PartnerSource Solutions. Contact him at: eric.klauss@snehalkalele.com Please follow me on Twitter @eklaussmentor Eric also volunteers to support small business owners via SCORE Orange County and you can view his free upcoming workshops via www.score114.org
