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Are You Ready to Use CRM in Your Marketing?
Marketing is key to the success of your company, because without new customers your business will eventually grow stagnant. The exception is if you are constantly offering new products that your existing customers will be interested in. With either scenario, your marketing is important for your success.
You can do everything you need to do manually. People have been marketing manually for decades, but the question is why would you want to when you have a powerful tool like the CRM system. You can be far more effective and it will allow you to grow your business much easier. For many years CRM systems cost so much that small business wasn’t interested, but in recent years that’s changed significantly, so do yourself a favor and explore whether a CRM system would be beneficial to you.
Let us first look at when you do not need CRM:
CRM means you have to spend money, but the real cost is more than just the fee you pay each month. CRM must be correctly implemented once you have chosen the right solution for your business. It will need to be integrated with your other software. You will also have to hire a specialized staff or contract person to take care of the integration and train people.
You also need your sales and marketing team to be excited and buy into using CRM to make it worthwhile. If your sales team is entering the information consistently and right after any sale, you will have a very strong base for leads and generating marketing campaigns, but if they aren’t interested and are not doing it correctly you will have wasted your money.
If your lead flow is low and you have a slow growth trajectory, you might want to use a spreadsheet for now. It isn’t fancy but it will do the job until you increase your leads and customer conversions.
Now let’s look at when you need to have a CRM system working for you:
If you are growing out of the small business, phase or you are already out of the ‘mom and pop’ stage that we talked about earlier, then you need CRM. The earlier you implement it the better. Many successful small companies have significant growth early on with leads growing by leaps and bounds. Then you NEED a CRM system now. Manually trying to track your customers and potential customers will quickly become a nightmare.
Think about it. Tracking 20 or 30 customers or leads in a database is easy. Tracking a 100 becomes very time consuming and over a 100 not only is it slow and a waste of your valuable time (time is money) you will have a cumbersome system that is not very effective. It’s time to get your CRM setup and running, otherwise, you’ll have a large part of your labor force focusing on maintaining a spreadsheet rather than doing their marketing or selling jobs.
Get your CRM system up and running today and begin to enjoy the many benefits including the ability to create effective marketing campaigns.
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