CRM business benefits.
Your CRM checklist.
Would your company Benefit?

After financial systems, CRM should be the most important strategic commercial application in your business. It's not just about sales and customers. It's also about your corporate IQ.

Read the following list of common business issues. If more than a few of them apply to you and your company then you should perhaps think about CRM.

  • It's difficult to share customer information in a team environment and there's no single view of all customer interactions (email, proposals, sales etc)

  • Producing meaningful management reports is time consuming and difficult and often means a plethora of Excel spreadesheets

  • Understanding what happens to Sales Leads is difficult

  • Revenue opportunities are missed because of poor recording, ineffficent and hard to measure sales processes, or inaccurate and out of date sales reports

  • Knowledge of which customers are most profitable is uncertain

  • A unified view of all customer touch points (web, phone, email, face-to-face) across your organisation is difficult or impossible to achieve

  • Critical customer information is often hard to locate and can sometimes be lost

  • Your company needs to respond faster to enquiries

  • Applications such as Microsoft Excel are barriers to efficient working because of the number of spreadsheets, the double-entry of key information and the difficulty of collaborative sharing.

  • Profiling and targeting customers for email and other marketing campaigns is difficult

  • Multiple entry of information across different software applications wastes time and leads to errors

  • Real-time accurate information and data is hard or impossible to achieve

  • Managing your sales team is difficult using spreadsheets and visit reports

  • Sales data is time consuming to analyse, often out-of-date and frequently inaccurate.

  • Key sales metrics such as conversion ratios from lead to opportunity to win or lose are difficult to calculate

  • You're unable to confidently predict cash flow because pipeline management isn't always right.

So, why use CRM?

Because CRM can address and resolve all the above issues. It's not a magic wand. It requires hard work and it takes time. But then, so do most of the good things in life.

The "Why use SugarCRM?" question is addressed here: