Ask any small business owner or salesperson about a missed sale, and they’re likely to remember a time or two when one piece of information could’ve won the business. What’s worse, they likely had that key detail, but it was buried in their customer relationship management (CRM) system and not easily accessible. A poorly organized or difficult to use CRM makes it almost impossible for your team to access the data they need when they need it.
For example, Woof and Brew, a company that develops and sells herbal teas for dogs, struggled with CRM tools created for larger companies. The complexity of the tool led to disorganized information, and the lack of integrations with other solutions it used made the tool a poor fit. When every piece of sales technology is entirely disparate or requires a lengthy onboarding process, the result is an inefficient and disorganized sales pipeline. You and your team don’t want to spend time searching for information. Prospect and customer data needs to be organized and easily discoverable.
Small businesses don’t typically have the manpower available to keep their sales pipelines tightly organized at all times. Centercode, which offers SaaS-based best test management solutions, conducts a significant amount of its sales and customer correspondence over email. Inevitably, some account details were entered into its CRM incorrectly or not at all. This led to missed opportunities that no small business can afford. Integrations between CRMs and other tools, like Gmail, Google Docs and Office 365, have emerged as a powerful solution for aggregating and organizing information. The more personalized experiences a small business can offer its prospects and customers, the more it will stand out against competitors.
The sales pipeline is the lifeblood of any company. It needs to be full and constantly replenished with new opportunities as deals come and go. It’s not enough just to identify new prospects, you need to keep advancing existing relationships. In order to achieve this, your sales pipeline and all of the data within it must be accurate and clean. This will help your team to provide prospects and customers with the best service and information needed to expand sales.
A comprehensive, fully integrated CRM can transform your small business’ sales. Our e-book, Make Your Sales Soar: Insightly for small business sales, will show you how.
At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.
