If you’re thinking of taking your business to new heights, you need a CRM. Why? Because as you scale and grow your business, you’ll need a system that can keep track of your dealings with your hundreds of thousands of customers so you can become more effective (faster) at following up with leads and closing sales. And without a CRM software, doing this will be extremely hard – and extremely costly.

Here’s a question for you:

Do you want to dramatically increase the revenue your business makes? Do you envision making $100,000, $1 million or even $10 million in ARR?

If yes, then you need a CRM.

Before we dive deep into why you need a CRM tool for your business, let’s first briefly see what a CRM is and what it does.

A customer relationship management software is a tool that helps you keep track of two main things:

1. Customer Data: This includes things like Names, Addresses, Phone Numbers and other personally identifiable information.

2. Customer Interactions: Any previous calls, messages, transactions or dealings you or your salesperson had with your customer.

This valuable information is stored within your CRM and anyone from your sales team to your marketing people can use this wealth of customer information (that you choose to give access to) to improve your company’s relationship with your customers so that you recieve more business from them.

Now that you have a good idea what a CRM does, you probably understand why it’s such a big deal with businesses and companies.

But still, you might need more information before you decide whether a CRM is a right fit for you as well.

That’s why, in this article, let’s take a look at 4 solid reasons why your business needs a CRM, no matter if it’s a budding startup just starting to break profits or a fortune 500 company making millions.

Reason 1: A CRM Gives You A Superior System for Organizing Your Business Contacts

As we mentioned above, the biggest advantage of using a CRM is that it stores all information about your new, existing and future customers in a single place.

No more messing around with post-it notes or bulky file cabinets.

With a CRM, all data is available in a unified platform. And that’s just the start. Here are a few factors that make a CRM the best way to organize and store your business contacts:

Your Customer Data Is Private And You Control Who Has Access To What Information

When you store your contacts information in a CRM, you have complete and total control of who sees what contact information within your company.

A CRM isn’t an all-you-can-eat-buffet where anyone who has access to a company computer can see you contact information.

Instead, you decide who has permission to access what customer information.  

For example, suppose you want your sales rep to follow up on new leads you to pitch them your new product.

Using a CRM, you can easily share the list of leads easily to them only without handing them info on existing customers. Moreover, if you don’t want your sales reps to see the physical address information of the leads they are following up on, you can choose to hide that information as well.

With a CRM, sharing information is safe, secure and can be shared privately to a select few people.

Your Data is Safe and Secure In The Cloud

Tragedy can befall anyone.

Maybe your computer systems gets infected with a virus. Maybe someone hacks into your IT system. Maybe your building burns down in a fire.

If you’re storing your valuable customer data in a spreadsheet file locally in your system and something like the above happens, you can say goodbye to all that data.

But if you store all your customer contact info in a CRM, no matter what happens to your computer systems, your data is safe – even if King Kong personally breaks into your building and smashes all your computers.

Why?

Because with a CRM, your data is never really stored in your computers. It’s stored in the cloud.

What this means is your data is stored on their own servers where they have a backup of a backup of your precious data. Plus, they employ the highest grade security measurements – much better than the one you have on your company computers that prevents hackers from breaking in.

Because of this, your data in a CRM tool is much more safer and secure.

Your Customer Interaction History Doesn’t Get Lost

This has been proven through research:

Excellent customer service = more $$

But how do you ensure your customers receive the best attention and service every time they call your sales team?

Because chances are, if they’re calling for the 2nd or 3rd time, they wouldn’t want to repeat everything they told the previous sales rep.

That’s where a CRM comes in.

With a CRM, every email, every message and every call is recorded and stored under their profile.

This means every time a customer calls, no matter what sales rep or customer service agent picks up, they can quickly look at the previous interactions in minutes instead of hours and solve your customers’ problems faster and more effortlessly and provide the same high level of customer service every single time.

And if a sales rep or customer agent leaves, their messages and data with your customers doesn’t get lost with them – but instead stays in your CRM where your new sales rep can view it instantly.

Views Can Help You Easily Visualize Data That Matters To You

Suppose you get more business than you can handle.

Now you’ve got a list of contacts where leads, existing customers, new prospects and everyone else is mixed up.

Sifting through a list of hundreds of contacts to finding the ones you’re looking for is a daunting task.

Thankfully, your CRM can save you from this trouble.

By making use of different ‘conditions’, you can get your CRM to show you exactly what category of information you want.

Want to see what new leads haven’t been contacted? Who is in the final stage of your buyers journey? Which lead is getting cold?

No matter what info you’re looking for, your CRM can show it to you instantly.

Messages and Emails are Centralized

If you don’t use a CRM to store your contacts and their data, you waste a lot of time.

Why?

Because instead of actually following up on leads, creating new personalized ad campaigns and other sales-focused activities, you spend your time looking for specific information.

This is because there is no single place data is located.

Customer information is stored in spreadsheets, emails are in another app, calls and messages are elsewhere.

So where does most of your sales rep, marketers and customer support agents’ energy go to?

Searching for information, that’s where.

But with a CRM software, all customer data and interactions is stored under one roof and can be found easily – meaning your employees can work faster and more effectively and ultimately, be highly informed in front of your customers.

You Save Time With Automation

Your marketing team is responsible for getting your sales team high quality leads to follow up – but the process of getting these leads from your marketing team to your sales reps can be a long, messy process when you don’t use a CRM.

First, any leads collected has to be organized in spreadsheets. Then, it’s the job of another person to sift through those leads and assign different leads to a different sales person. From there, the sales person has to create their own spreadsheet and on and on it goes.

So, if you’re looking for just one reason to use a CRM software, it’s to put an end to the messy headache that is spreadsheets as a CRM.

With a CRM, you can automate many labour-intensive tasks such as:

1. Automate Creation of New Leads:

With a CRM, you don’t have to manually enter leads and lead information ever again.

You can simply create a web form that can be added to any website, email or marketing campaign.

There, your audience can fill in the data you want.

This web form can then be integrated with your CRM where every time a new visitor enters their contact information, it is entered into your CRM system where it is automatically assigned for your sales rep to follow up on.

2. API or Sync Record Creation Directly To Your CRM

If your leads are being generated using a service outside your CRM i.e your email marketing software etc., there is a way for you to directly integrate that service with your CRM.

Why does your CRM allows you to do this?

So that new leads can automatically get added to your CRM without you having to manually copy-paste it your CRM, even though you are using two different services to create and manage your leads

There are two ways to automatically add your contacts to your CRM from a 3rd party lead generation service:

1. Add Your CRM API Key: Your CRM will give you your own unique API key. Simply copy that and paste it inside your email marketing or any other lead generation app under ‘integrations’. Once done, you’ll be able to import your contacts to your CRM software.

2. Sync Using Automation Software: Automation software like Zapier can be set up so that every time a new contact is created, the contact and all its accompanying information is automatically added to your CRM.

It’s worth noting that by using automation software, it’s not easy to get existing contact’s information that’s been modified added to your CRM as well.

However, by using the CRM API, you’ll be able to constantly sync with your 3rd party lead generation service and any contact that gets updated that will also easily get updated in your CRM too.

3. Welcome Email Automation

 In CRMs, you can set up different actions to be triggered when an event happens.

One such case is when you want to send welcome emails to a new lead or contact.

Usually, you’d have to open the Welcome email template, add their name and hit send for every single new lead you get, but with a CRM, you can automate that task to happen automatically.

And that’s not all, your CRM can also add the name of the contact to the email and other personal information before sending on your behalf, making the welcome email sending process completely automated.

Log Activities and Optimize Workflow With Reports

You need to know what’s going on between your company employees and your customers.

For that, you need to track what activities are happening.

How many leads did your sales team follow up on? How many messages did your customer support team send your customers? How many sales did you close?

All this information is hard to keep track of.

Unless you use a CRM. Because with it, you can log activities and interactions between your sales team and your customers.

Most notable benefits you can get of logging activities is your customers will receive continuous support: Your customers will talk to a variety of your sales people, marketing people and support agents.

Having a clear activity log of their interactions with your company can make your employees well informed on how best to serve them next and will prevent them from asking your customers any repetitive information.