You might think that your service business is doing fine without a CRM in place. Besides, you’ve been closing sales and all has been good for a few years or months now.
However, running a business without a CRM in place has its downsides, which you might not be aware of. Today, we will discuss the opportunities lost and why you should consider using a CRM system for your service-based business as soon as possible.
What is CRM to a Service Business?
Customer Relationship Management Software or CRM helps with gathering customer information and interaction all in one system. It helps centrally manage leads and sales data to help with the improvement of customer retention, satisfaction, and overall experience.
All service businesses, working with customers, regardless of size and industry, can benefit from using a CRM system. Besides supporting everyday communication, it can also help boost sales, give better analytics and tracking KPIs, help your team become more efficient and improve transparency in the workplace.
If you have never used a CRM solution, you might not even realize what yuo are missing. Yes, there are downsides to managing a service business without a CRM system in place. Below, we will outline some of them and explain why you should consider using Sales CRM for your business.
You Lose Track How Customers Find You
As a business owner and team leader, you’d want to know how your customers and clients were acquired. You’d also want to solidify your relationship with your customers to be able to stay consistent and optimize your leads.
Without a CRM system in place, it would be difficult to track how they find you or why they chose your company over the other ones in the market. You might miss to improve your best sales channels or reward referring affiliates.
With the team using Sales CRM, you can easily identify and keep track of where your customers are coming from so you can work on strengthening these channels. This will also make your communication more relevant and improve your customer relationship.
Sales/Leads Contacts and Data Can Be Lost or Wrong
Without a good CRM system in place, you run the risk of collecting bad data. When you work with customers, there is nothing worse than keeping outdated or wrong data, as this might ruin your whole business and create a lot of problems.
CRM systems can be easily configured to alerts when data and contacts are missing, old or there was some issue. Sales reps and everyone using the CRM can just click on the reason they weren’t able to contact a customer, update their contacts on their own or notify of other communication problems. This way, the system is updated on a regular basis and team leaders can easily check the status of each account.
Missing Opportunities to Close Deals
Your sales and front-desk staff can easily get overwhelmed if they are using too many apps and tools. They might not be able to be as productive as they should be because they are spending way too much time tracking data and moving it from one system to another.
Because of this, leads can easily be lost and missed opportunities to close deals might happen. Instead of pouring their time and effort into finding new customers, your employees are spending way too much time managing these systems.
With a central CRM system, they can easily place and locate all customer data in one dashboard. They don’t need to exert too much effort in managing different tools, which can lead to better productivity.
Reaching Sales Targets Can Be More Difficult and Not Properly Tracked
As a business owner, you’d want to make sure that your sales teams are doing their best and customers are getting the service they pay for. Without a CRM system in place, you would not be able to know if your employees are actually doing their best to make sure that your customers come first.
CRM provides data-driven productivity reports that you can view anytime to make sure that your employees are hitting their targets and doing their work on time. You can visibly track which salesperson is doing the most for your business and customers, so you reward them or in case of low performance, help them improve. You can also make sure that your customers are well taken care of and proper communication is always in place.
Less Control and Security for Your Data
Using only spreadsheets and not a CRM system can make it confusing to find the data that you need. You also run the risk of losing all your data, which can be very difficult to locate and restore.
Additionally, data can be difficult to protect and stay confidential. Not all of your sales reps need to see certain data, and using just spreadsheets can be difficult to keep your data private. You’d also run the risk of having some of your reps accidentally delete the data, which can be difficult to restore.
You Would Not Be Able to See the Bigger Picture
All service-based businesses should keep data to empower their owners to make the right decisions for their growth. The data has to be accurate, updated, and relevant so that the bigger picture is clear and business planning is done.
However, it can be difficult to track and use the right data if it is spread all over the place. Without a single CRM, most companies do not have enough time to track their data, which leads them to just go with their gut feeling instead of relying on accurate data.
As a result, companies and businesses do not get to “see the forest for the trees” and get lost in all the data that could help their business to thrive.
No Automated Sales Reports and Forecasts
Without proper sales reports and forecasts, you would not know if your employees are actually hitting their targets and working to acquire new customers. As we have established by now, spreadsheets and scattered documents can easily confuse your employees and team leaders.
With a CRM system, you can use templates for daily, weekly, and monthly reports to make sure that teams and employees are hitting their targets. All your leads and prospects could be included in forecasts and workloads distributed accordingly.
Conclusion
Having a CRM system in place can definitely help your business grow and flourish. Make sure to choose the right one, as every business has unique needs when it comes to CRM systems.