Is This True: Having a CRM is Essential for a Small Business?

I recent­ly heard a mar­ket­ing con­sul­tant, dur­ing one of his lec­tures, tell his audi­ence that it was not essen­tial to have a CRM for one’s paint­ing (insert your indus­try) busi­ness. This state­ment was made because some­one in the audi­ence asked him what CRM he rec­om­mend­ed. The mar­keter did not rec­om­mend a CRM and just said, ​“I do not care what you use for a CRM…Excel would work fine or even a pen­cil and a pad.” I get what the con­sul­tant was say­ing. This was in the con­text of hunt­ing for new leads and reach­ing back out to past clients. The mar­keter had the idea that some­times a CRM can be overkill and a time waster for sales­peo­ple.

Is a CRM Real­ly Necessary?

I have seen com­pa­nies use a rolodex sys­tem, files/​folders, CRM, Excel, Email, and Post-It notes to keep track of reminders, next steps, sales process, and their cus­tomers. Should your com­pa­ny invest the time and resources by using a Cus­tomer Rela­tion­ship Man­age­ment (CRM) pro­gram? I know some of you will not be shocked when I say that a con­tract­ing busi­ness should use a CRM. Why? I think it helps keep your busi­ness on track, focused and more sell­able down the road. It also pro­vides bet­ter account­abil­i­ty with your team. I recent­ly talked to some­one who hired their first sales­per­son and asked if he had a CRM to keep track of his prospect­ing, lead gen­er­a­tion, and sales pipeline? I, then, encour­aged the own­er to try a CRM for a few weeks and get the sales guy to com­mit to using it. Fast for­ward a few weeks, the own­er end­ed up fir­ing the sales­per­son. The deci­sion to let him go was large­ly due to the fact that the CRM did not lie. The sales­man was lazy, and he could not con­tin­ue to get by the own­er now that the CRM was giv­ing him reports. A CRM has been a wise choice for me because it real­ly does help keep me on task. I do the bulk of the sell­ing at my job. How­ev­er, I do not prospect and sell every­day. It is just my indus­try. It is every now and then. An esti­ma­tor for a paint­ing com­pa­ny should be prospect­ing and/​or sell­ing each day. That is why a CRM is vital for a sales staff. Because my sales is not full time, I still use a CRM to help with the next steps and my long sales cycle. I some­times have pro­pos­als that can take weeks if not months to sell. Some­times prospects will come back 6 – 12 months lat­er and sign up. I can go into my CRM and with­in sec­onds have their infor­ma­tion at my fin­ger­tips.

Does It Mat­ter What Type of CRM To Use?

The mar­ket­ing con­sul­tant I men­tioned at the begin­ning of this post said it did not mat­ter what type of CRM one used. On that point, I actu­al­ly agree with him, but I would strong­ly sug­gest stay­ing away from Excel, Post-It Notes, and a Rolodex! There are hun­dreds of choic­es on the mar­ket to have a con­tact man­ag­er. A CRM should at least have the basic func­tions of a con­tact man­ag­er, a sales cycle that you can cus­tomize and good report­ing. I have tried dozens upon dozens of CRMs over the years. I con­tin­ue to get emailed from CRM com­pa­nies ask­ing me to review their pro­gram. They all have their strengths and weak­ness­es. There are some that are more geared toward the con­struc­tion indus­try. Yet I don’t care for some of those pro­grams because they are not real user friend­ly or pro­vide more fea­tures than my cus­tomers will ever use. Most of the painters I work with nation­wide have set­tled on using a CRM called Pipeline Deals (affil­i­ate link). I have worked with Pipeline close to when I start­ed my com­pa­ny in 2009. They have been great to work with, and they pro­duce a very sim­ple and easy to use CRM that works. I am an affil­i­ate because I have a bit of influ­ence with them. In oth­er words, I can pro­vide feed­back that my cus­tomers want…and they lis­ten to me! We are a great team. The oth­er pro­gram I use, and I know many folks have signed up to use, is Base CRM. This is a sim­ple CRM but also has very com­plex and advanced fea­tures as well. It is scal­able for small, medi­um, and even large orga­ni­za­tions. Try Base. I am affil­i­ate of Base as well as I have helped with test­ing out new fea­tures and am kept aware of devel­op­ment. I am also able to pro­vide valu­able feed­back to their devel­op­ment team. The biggest play­er in the indus­try con­tin­ues to be Sales­Force. They have a num­ber of pric­ing lev­els to fit the bill…and you can’t go wrong with it. I only have a few clients using Sales­force. They all seem to think it is ​“just fine.” I would say it requires a lot more train­ing and time invest­ment to uti­lize all their fea­tures. It is a pret­ty pow­er­ful CRM sys­tem. The com­pa­nies that use it do over $10M a year in rev­enue and have a larg­er sales staff.

Your Turn

I know what I men­tioned is not rock sci­ence in this post. It was writ­ten in response to this mar­keter who thought that a CRM can be a waste of time for many busi­ness­es: gets in the way. My point is that hav­ing a CRM and mak­ing it a part of your sys­tem will real­ly stream­line your busi­ness sys­tems. You just need to com­mit to get­ting and using a CRM. Do you agree? What are you using to keep track of clients and stay in touch?