5 Signs You Need CRM

20 Jan 2014

So you’ve been told that you need a CRM system. Maybe a friend or trusted colleague has said something, maybe you’ve just read the phrase so often that you think you must need one, or maybe you worked at a company that used one and have moved to one that doesn’t. You’ve had a look around and found that the market for CRM is enormous and you’re feeling a little out of your depth.

You start to think that maybe you don’t really need one and this might be true. Some people and businesses can get by just fine without a CRM system, but others can’t conduct business without them. CRM systems can do a lot of different things and mean different things to different people, so knowing when and if you need one can be tricky.

I’ve come up with a list of five signs that you should get a CRM system. It’s not a definitive list, but if you recognise yourself [and/or your business] in one or more of these scenarios, it’s probably worth your time looking into a CRM system:

1. Your desk is covered in post-its and scraps of paper reminding you of things you need to do or people to call. If your system of remembering your to-do list and phone messages is basically just using scraps of paper, you probably need to look into a system that includes contact management.

2. You have a shared drive with your co-workers that contains a huge number of templates and documents that you send out to customers on a regular basis. While this kind of template system can be a great way of organising your company’s documents and ensuring that everything that gets sent out is on brand, it is open to abuse. For example, there is no way of making a field mandatory on those templates and I bet people accidentally save over them all the time too. Many CRM systems, including OpenCRM, have a document merge function whereby you can export customer (or company, opportunity, etc) details into a template. The benefit is that these cannot be altered, except by administrators, and you can make fields on the contact record (or any other record) mandatory.

3. You have a manual support ticket system (either paper or excel/word) and they are constantly missing information or getting forgotten about. This is another instance where making fields mandatory can help a great deal to ensure that your customer service team have the information they need. Additionally, you can programme SLA times into your tickets, keep all email communication linked to a ticket, create email templates to ensure you’re always on brand, and so many other great features.

4. You can’t just look in one place to know which invoices haven’t been paid. If you can’t find out how many invoices are overdue within 5 minutes, the way you can within a CRM system, then you’re essentially spending your valuable time doing busy work. Additionally, with a system like OpenCRM, you can see those overdue invoices linked to a customer’s record and make sure that you don’t accidentally begin a new project with or release a more product to someone who isn’t paying for your services.

5. You use an online email campaign app, but don’t know how this information actually relates to your specific customers/leads. There are a number of online email campaigning apps, Campaign Monitor and MailChip spring to mind, and these are fantastic at what they do. However, the downside of standalone products like these is that it isn’t easy to see how an individual customer’s click-through-rates relate to their purchasing history without some serious leg work. A CRM system that has a fully integrated campaign manager, like OpenCRM, gives you the ability to do just that.

If you’re still not convinced, why don’t you head over to our demo, within just a few minutes you can be sitting in a fully configured and populated CRM system? Take it for a spin, see how easy it is to look at your to-do list, create a document or PDF, check out your invoices, and see how your campaigns are doing…all with just a few clicks.