CRM is the acronym for Customer Relationship Management, and consists of a set of practices, strategies, and technologies for better customer management.
More and more the work of a commercial must be controlled by himself in order to be able to manage his work, measure each movement and what its influence is on the results. CRM, nowadays, is the commercial’s best friend, as well as the commercial director, who can see at every moment how your sales process is going.
Having gone beyond the description of the tool, I believe that the fundamental of this article is to convey the importance and the differences that I have identified from the moment of implementation.
In fact, when we work out the processes of a company and organize it by the various sectors, each one of them must be structured in such a way that one day when one person is absent, the information is still available, and presented clearly, so that everyone can understand it quickly.
When I worked on sales without a place to concentrate all the information, I had a hard time controlling the processes and understanding where each proposal was at, how long it took to be approved, what needed to be done on each budget presented. One of the big problems that I also identified was that when there was more than one person communicating with the “prospect”, the information that was transmitted was lost, and the final information was confused. I also had difficulty measuring where most of the leads were coming from, in order to understand which channel was our strongest and to invest in that channel.
In fact, since we implemented our CRM, as the main responsible for the company’s sales, I can now, with one click, have a presentation of several indicators that gives me a holistic notion of how the company’s sales are doing.
In fact, the tool alone does not bring results, but the commitment we have to it does. That is why nowadays all leads, contacts, organizations and deals that are made in the company are concentrated in the CRM. We customize the software, taking into account our sales process, and all the information that is put there is relevant. Our business process is evaluated from there, and there is a very strong premise, “if it’s not in the CRM, it didn’t happen”, so all the calls, meetings, messages, emails, social media contacts are there, and I can measure all the indicators quite accurately.
With this evolution, the results have increased considerably, and every week the tool is improved, and every week the company evolves and our needs in the commercial department also increase. I recommend to the reader that when you are deciding which CRM to implement in your company, that you decide on the one that fits your needs, and that is very flexible, so that you can always respond in the best way.
Nowadays there is a lot of information on the Internet, and for this very reason, only those who are stagnant will not evolve their business process. This tool should be a priority for a commercial team, so that everything can be measured, processes improved, sales increased, and the company grown.
Raul Peixoto, CFO ADN Agency.pt