You’re a small business owner. You have some revenue. You have some clients. You have a lot of paperwork you’re doing by hand. You have paper files. You’re losing your paper files. You have Excel files. You and your employees have different versions of those Excel files. You need software. You need Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to track all those clients, the work you’re doing for them, and when you get paid. Not convinced? Here are 10 signs that you’re ready for a hosted CRM software solution.
You need to get an idea of who your customers are
You’re pretty sure you know some of your customers. They’re the ones who keep calling complaining about deadlines. However, can you access all of your customers at the click of a mouse? Can you find out their entire purchase history, their last invoice, or their birthday by
pressing a few buttons? With hosted CRM, you can.
You need to know who your next customer is going to be
More than likely, your next customer is either a referral from your existing customer base (but you need to ask) or a company that looks like one of your customers. Use a hosted Microsoft CRM 2011 solution so you can find out who you need to ask for a referral or to run reports on who your best customers are so you can find more like them.
You need to remember to actually contact your customers
Funny thing about customer relationships: you have to work at them. Are you contacting your customers via phone, email, or old fashioned face-to-face meeting? How often? Are speaking with everyone with whom you should be? A hosted Microsoft CRM package can let you know all of these things about your customer contacts … and more!
Your sales manager is spending too much time on Facebook
The best cure for Facebook: keeping busy. Put sales charts, leads, new opportunities, and a variety of tools at your sales managers’ fingers and make sure they’re doing what they should be: selling for you. Without needing to configure a single thing, Microsoft will give you the tools to qualify leads, build a sales pipeline, and help you close more sales.
Your sales staff actually likes earning commissions
Salespeople love to sell. They don’t like all the other stuff that goes with selling (activity logs, reporting status, entering in meeting notes, etc.) With a hosted Microsoft CRM solution, you can mobile-enable your entire sales group for less than what you are paying for phone lines. That gives them access to email and phone logs, meeting note entry, and complete customer records anywhere they are that has cell access.
You can’t run your business on Excel any more
Excel is great, but it’s a spreadsheet, not a sales tool, accounting package, reporting suite, and performance review tool rolled into one. Even worse, it’s so easy to show up to a meeting where everyone has their own copy of the “official” Excel document. Leave all of that behind and let a hosted CRM solution help you manage customers, sales, and reports and never worry about bringing the wrong version of an Excel doc to a meeting again.
Your CRM and your accounting package aren’t talking to each other
Hosted Microsoft CRM solutions are built on interoperability. As long as your accounting package can export a file, offer a Web Service, or expose functionality via an API, your CRM and your accounting software can be talking in no time. Update customer records with invoice, AP, and AR data in CRM and create new vendors and customer records in your accounting system with just a press of a button.
You need to track service tickets
CRM is more than just sales. You can use it for case management, tracking support requests,
authorizing medical procedures, managing inventory, and just about anything else you need.
You have client projects and you’d like to know their progress.
Execution on all of the promises made during the sales cycle is just as important as closing the deal. Use a hosted CRM solution to track your projects, communicate project requirements, and get easy reporting on when you can bill.
You have a business
If you have a business, you need a CRM solution. If you have a small-to-medium sized business, look very carefully at a hosted CRM software package. You don’t have to pay IT costs or worry about servers or hosting. You pay one easy monthly fee and before you know it, you are streamlining your entire business with the help of one easy-to-use, secure, powerful software package.