How Can You Run a Small Business Without a CRM?

Can you run a small ser­vice busi­ness with­out a Cus­tomer Rela­tion­ship Man­age­ment (CRM) pro­gram? Of course you can. This might be you read­ing this post. You might even be mak­ing mon­ey with­out a CRM. Life might be sim­ple and easy for you not hav­ing all this soft­ware and track­ing fea­tures. Yet, I encour­age you to read on. Even though you can run a busi­ness with­out a CRM pro­gram, and this is just my opin­ion, I think you will have bet­ter results and growth when you imple­ment and com­mit to using a CRM. Let me explain a few ben­e­fits to why I think it is cru­cial that you con­sid­er a CRM for your ser­vice com­pa­ny and why it should not be shelved to a future date.

Brief Review of What a CRM Does?

A cus­tomer rela­tion­ship (CRM) pro­gram does a pletho­ra of things. For the sake of time, a CRM basi­cal­ly helps you record your inter­ac­tions with prospects, leads and cus­tomers through all stages of the sales process and beyond. An exam­ple would be: a lead fills out a form on your web­site. This lead is then record­ed in your CRM sys­tem. A sales­per­son will then cre­ate a deal and fol­low up process with the lead. Depend­ing on the func­tion­al­i­ties of that par­tic­u­lar CRM, one could have a list of fol­low up steps for every stage of the sales process: emails to send, fol­low up reminder and so forth. From a report­ing stand­point, a good CRM will allow your staff to run lots of very help­ful reports such as: How many leads did you get this month vs last month? or How many leads did I get from the web­site vs yard signs? It can also track not only the source but the dol­lar amount won, lost and pend­ing. Some CRMs go even fur­ther with advanced report­ing.

Ben­e­fits of Hav­ing a CRM

1. Track­ing results

If there was one rea­son to have a CRM it is because you can track results for your mar­ket­ing and sales. I have spo­ken to many (yes many) con­trac­tors over the years who do not use a CRM and can­not tell me a num­ber of sim­ple answer to ques­tions like:

“How many leads did you get last year?” ​“How many sales did you make off of the web last month? ​“What was your aver­age sale from web leads vs repeat cus­tomers?” ​“Where are most of your leads and sales com­ing from?” ​“How much are you spend­ing on ________?” 

Would it not be nice to know the answers to ques­tions like these? Once you have answers and have bet­ter track­ing in place, you’ll be more pre­pared to make bet­ter mar­ket­ing and sales deci­sions when new ideas sur­face.

2. Man­ag­ing of Sales Staff 

A good sales­man is not typ­i­cal­ly great at using a CRM. No, he or she is good at sell­ing but not nec­es­sar­i­ly in all the details. I have noticed a lot of esti­ma­tors in the paint­ing busi­ness real­ly do not like CRMs. Yet if these esti­ma­tors do not com­mit to using a CRM, the track­ing I men­tioned above can­not hap­pen. They real­ly are hurt­ing them­selves as well as the com­pa­ny. So hav­ing a CRM and mak­ing it a com­pa­ny pol­i­cy that your sales­peo­ple have to use it is vital. Not only should you make it manda­to­ry that they plug in their fig­ures, your or your sales man­ag­er can then login and track the results of his/​her sales team. I love this fea­ture in a CRM. One can look at all the open bids when times are slow and ask the ques­tion, ​“I see you have 30 open bids this past month. ​“How do you plan on fol­low­ing up on those bids and when will this happen?” 

3. Keeps Your Busi­ness More Organized

Noth­ing like being more orga­nized and mak­ing it easy to find things. Although I test a num­ber of CRM, and there are lots of great ones on the mar­ket, I use Base CRM for my main pro­gram. I love their email fea­ture that plays very nice­ly with Google Apps. I can send and receive emails direct­ly in Base. So when I am work­ing on sales myself, I try to send emails only with Base CRM. I can tell when a prospect opens my email, for exam­ple! I can quick­ly cre­ate task and fol­low ups with­in Base for next steps as well. In short, when I use my CRM like I am sup­posed to, sales do not fall through the cracks. I can quick­ly look at where I am at and what I have to do next!

4. Mail­ing & Email List 

If you want to send out a cus­tom email or mail­ing list to select clients, a CRM can help you orga­nize and make a cus­tomer mail/​email list. Believe me, I have had cus­tomers that did not use a CRM have a heck of a time com­ing up with list for my team to use when we were putting togeth­er a mail­ing or email cam­paign. Some­times this process took weeks to get a good and clean list. Hav­ing your con­tacts sort­ed and ready when­ev­er you need it is vital to your mar­ket­ing and growth. 

5. Grow­ing Your Business

Your busi­ness will grow with a CRM that is active­ly part of your busi­ness. Notice I did not say it might grow. I strong­ly believe that if you com­mit to using a cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment pro­gram and nev­er let it get dusty, your busi­ness will grow more than if you did not use one! Is this not per­haps the #1 rea­son you should con­sid­er one for your company? 

Get­ting Start­ed with a CRM

Most of my clients are paint­ing con­trac­tors. I am get­ting clos­er to mak­ing sure every client uses a CRM, but as of today, there are still a few that are not quite there. I hope they are read­ing this post! So even I have work to do to con­vince them to use such a great tool. If you are not using a CRM, com­mit today. Do not put this item on the shelf and say you will do it some­day. If you are won­der­ing what CRM to use, I would sug­gest start­ing with a pro­gram that is fair­ly sim­ple unless you have a team that can real­ly help imple­ment it. For exam­ple,Base CRM and Pipeline Deals are two, what I would call, easy and sim­ple CRMs. Base is a bit more expen­sive and has more fea­tures. I have explained some of the ben­e­fits of Base in this blog post. Pipeline Deals is very sim­ple to get start­ed with and has the basic fea­tures you’d need to be suc­cess­ful with imple­ment­ing a CRM. Many of my painters are still using Pipeline. The ones that move to a dif­fer­ent CRM like Sales­force or Base nor­mal­ly want more fea­tures that they can­not live with­out. I have writ­ten a bit more about Pipeline in this old­er blog post. Since then, the prod­uct has got­ten even bet­ter! Let me know how you are using a CRM now or plan to use it!