5 Signs Your Business Needs a CRM

"Sales" is the lifeblood of any business. 

Far from being siloed from other departments at your business, your sales process plays a critical role in both your fulfillment and marketing strategy. 

Without a steady flow of new customers, businesses will fall by wayside. This is equally important from both a retention standpoint, as well as acquiring new customers. Consider that 50% of small businesses fail within their first five years of operation.

One of the easiest investments you can make to improve your sales and conversion rate is to invest in customer relations management (CRM) software.

Any industry can benefit from a CRM too, whether you’re a sign making business or a small embroidery shop. 

At shopVOX, we make it easier for businesses to streamline their sales process and record critical data. Let’s just say, operating without a CRM in this century is like relying on a fax machine to communicate with clients. 

Here, we’d like to share five major warning signs that will convince you that you need to invest in a CRM immediately.

Data Gets Lost

Tracking your sales leads across multiple channels can mean storing data on multiple personal hard drives. While a shared spreadsheet can help to centralize this data, this process is rife with errors that can lead to lost data. It's also a huge time waster. 

A CRM can automate data retrieval by incorporating multiple APIs from your sales channels to record data from initial touchpoints to follow up. Furthermore, a CRM like shopVOX can help make sense of this data by creating data visualizations and averages that lead to more personalized sales strategies. 
For example, you would be totally unaware that a majority of your leads are converting from display advertising unless you crunched the numbers of every lead from every channel. Not only does a CRM protect all of your data, but it helps you find more meaningful data through proprietary insights.

There’s Very Little Visibility into the Sales Process

Along the same lines, fractured and unorganized data offers very little visibility into how you actually acquire leads and convert them. Not only can a CRM help identity sales strategies and activities that are leading to wins, it can also help you identify inefficiencies that are only inflating your overhead. 

That’s right, a CRM comes with an ROI.

Sales Staff Struggles to Convert Customers

Leaks in your sales funnel can mean the literal death of your business. The sales staff that struggle to convert customers most likely doesn’t have the right data available to them. 

With a CRM, your sales staff can establish a process for nurturing customers through your funnel. This can be especially helpful for in-house marketers who are struggling to improve their own KPI’s.

Your Sales Process is Inconsistent and Impersonal

Most likely, your conversion ratio and sales numbers are faltering because your sales process is too impersonal. From serving personalized content to identifying specific pain points with your customers, people demand more personalized advertising. 

Along the same lines, administrative work using manual data entry takes away time from getting to know your clients and selling to them.

Your Current Process is Unscalable

Finally, a CRM is simply scalable. As your company grows, manual data entry and spreadsheets will only increase the amount of time spent on administrative work. This is highly inefficient and will only slow the growth of your company.

This leads us to our main point. Every second not spent on sales is a second spent spending money, rather than earning money. Businesses need to invest in an automated customer relations management solution in order to scale their company. Or else they’ll find themselves in that 50% margin of businesses who do fail.