CRM

What a CRM does

• One record per customer: contacts, company, every email, call, quote and order, visible to everyone who deals with them.
• A sales pipeline: each enquiry moves through stages, from new to offer to won or lost, always with a next step and a date.
• Reminders and tasks: nobody has to remember to call back; the system does.
• Reports: how many enquiries came in, from which channel, how many became customers and how long it took.

Well-known systems include HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive and Zoho. Many businesses also use a CRM built into their ERP system or written for them.

Example

A company that sells and installs industrial doors receives about 120 enquiries a month by phone, by email and through the website form. They are kept in three inboxes and a spreadsheet. When the team checks a quarter, 30% of the enquiries never received an offer, mostly because each salesperson thought a colleague had taken them.

With a CRM, every enquiry from the form and from email lands in one list with an owner and a deadline for the offer. After three months, 95% of enquiries get an offer within two working days. At the same rate of one signed contract in five offers, that is about 18 more contracts a quarter, at an average of €3,200 each.

Why it matters for a business

Without a CRM, what a company knows about its customers lives in people’s heads and inboxes, and leaves with them. Enquiries get lost between colleagues, offers go unanswered, and nobody can say which advertising brings customers rather than clicks. A CRM fixes the first two by giving every enquiry an owner and a next step. It fixes the third only if the website and the ads feed it directly: when each form records where the visitor came from, the report can show the cost per lead and the cost per won customer for each channel.

The usual failure is not the software but the habit. A CRM that the team fills in after the fact, or not at all, is an expensive address book. Choose one simple enough that recording a call takes less time than not recording it.

What to ask

• Where are our enquiries recorded today, and how many of them received no answer last month?
• Do the website forms create a CRM record automatically, with the source of the visit?
• Can we see which channel brings customers, not only enquiries?
• Does the CRM talk to our accounting or ERP, or is the same customer typed in twice? See system integration.

When enquiries from the site and from advertising go straight into the CRM, you can see which channel brings customers, not only clicks. We build that link between site, form and CRM in our web software work.