Mr Steve Anderson. CEO & Founder. Interstellar Technologies Ltd. Interested in enterprise package, call scheduled 24th Nov at 1.30pm.
Mrs Angela Davis. Sales Director. Futura Building Supplies Ltd. Interested in enterprise package, call scheduled 26th Nov at 10.30am.
Mr James Matthews ...
And so the spreadsheet (or worse, scribbled on paper) continues.
Line after line of leads, a vague line or two on their status, and any notes.
The basic spreadsheet is how many SaaS companies start out when it comes to managing relationships with potential customers, but it only scales so far.
In this post I share 5 reasons your SaaS company should ditch the spreadsheets, and start using a CRM.
1) Sales & Marketing Integration
To be effective, sales and marketing have to work together. Without a CRM system in place, this is onerous. It's likely that your marketing team will have no access to the sales team's information on leads, and that your sales team will have no information from marketing on the lead's activities to date.
By using a CRM system, and integrating it with inbound marketing software like HubSpot, your sales and marketing teams can work seamlessly to generate and close deals.
2) Measurement
It's very difficult to measure the performances of sales reps using disparate spreadsheets.
You might know how many deals each of your sales representatives are closing, but can you see where in the sales process they're getting stuck? Which reps close which types of leads best? The size of your existing sales pipeline?
Trying to make sense of spreadsheets can involve a lot of number crunching, chart building and combining multiple sets of data. It takes a lot of time, and is impossible when your sales team are using spreadsheets inconsistently.
A CRM system allows you to quickly measure the performance of all sales reps, see where team members need help, and determine who to assign which leads.
3) More Efficient Sales Reps
A CRM system can dramatically increase the efficiency of your sales reps. Where before they might have to go through their entire inbox hunting for something they sent months ago, or page through an endless spreadsheet to find notes on a lead, with CRM your sales data is centralised.
One login means your sales reps can quickly do a search, find a lead, and know everything they need to know about that lead's entire relationship with your company, from who they've talked to, to their role and why they're a lead.
This saves your sales reps heaps of time, and makes them much more productive.
4) Improved Customer Service
Your CRM system doesn't only store data for your prospects, but also existing customers.
Your customer support team can use your CRM software to help in troubleshooting, and to quickly find out everything they need to know about a customer. This saves customers time on the phone, improving perceived quality of service. No more 100 questions everytime a customer calls support.
Logging support requests, discussions, and relevant notes in the CRM system also makes it easy for any employee to quickly bring up a customer's entire relationship history. This can help with identifying unprofitable customers (e.g. those that are a drag on support resource), determining product improvements to be made and more.
All four of these reasons come together to do two things: increase your revenue, and decrease your costs. A recent study by Nucleus Research indicated that for every £1 spent on CRM software, companies generate a return of £5.60.
So why hasn't your organisation invested in a CRM system yet?