Do You Really Need a CRM? Here’s How to Know

This week, I was asked why a small business would need a CRM. My take on it is that they might… but they might not, too! As an independent advisor, I have nothing to gain by selling someone a product they don’t need. I’d rather say that a CRM is the wrong choice for you right now than sell you a product you don’t need.

Which businesses do not need a CRM system at all?

You know the saying about plumbers always having a broken toilet? The reality was that for a long time, my business did not need a CRM, even while I was regularly choosing and implementing systems for my clients.

The reason was that I was working with a relatively small number of clients, I was the only person managing the sales process, and I was getting most of my business through referrals. I wasn’t doing any significant outreach, and I was able to communicate and coordinate my client interactions through simple tools like email, lists on Excel, and to-do items.

If you are well organised and have a small, streamlined business, then you might not need a CRM yet, and in fact you might be wasting your time and money on one. If you are sticking with a small number of clients, and a simple and manageable communications process, you are probably good to go on without a CRM.

So, when might this change?

When you start marketing at scale, particularly online.

Managing an email list and sending mass emails will quickly overwhelm your own email address and potentially get you flagged as a spammer. If an email list and newsletter are all you need, your first CRM step might be a basic (and very affordable) email tool. Often clients realise that their ambitions are for more than just sending a newsletter, and then you start to consider automated email sequences and links to your website. There are many popular and well-supported systems at many levels, such as Mailer Lite, Klaviyo, Constant Contact, and more.

When you start to grow your sales team.

In this case, businesses often don’t realise how valuable a CRM might be for them until things go a bit wrong. If you only have one or two excellent, highly trusted salespeople with whom you have a great relationship, you can go on without a CRM.

But when one of them leaves suddenly and you realise that you don’t even have contact details for the customers they are currently working with, never mind visibility of the deals that they have in progress. Or you find yourself building multiple spreadsheets and asking the team to constantly update them just to try and understand what sales volume you might have coming down the pipeline. Or you find that your sales team is either stepping on each other’s toes or unable to provide support and backup when a colleague is on leave. Each of your team members manages their sales and follow-up in their own way, and when you bring someone new on as you grow, you realise that there is no defined process or best practice for selling or even managing the administrative details of who is doing what and when.

There are many entry-level sales-oriented CRMs that can help you streamline this process and gain instant visibility over your sales team, for example, PipeDrive, Insightly and Capsule CRM

When you have a lot of different people talking to your customers.

On a small scale, you can manage this with a whiteboard (or some digital equivalent). With everyone on the team noting key communications and status updates for a small number of customers so that the whole team is informed when a customer calls.

This can quickly get out of hand or just get expensive. When a customer calls, your team has to check a number of different files and systems to work out what is going on while the customer waits impatiently on the line. Or, even worse, you give them the wrong information. And increasingly, your team is getting caught up in that death loop of spending so much time on customer enquiries that they are falling behind on delivering the services that the customer is asking about!

So maybe I do need a CRM?

Another case when you might not need a specialised CRM is when your other systems have CRM elements. For example, your eCommerce storefront, accounting/ERP tool, or online course management software might all have functions that help you manage your customer interactions.

Some examples include Kajabi (an online course system) with basic CRM marketing capability. Manufacturing or distribution businesses might use an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) tool like NetSuite or Epicor, which will have some CRM features to help track customer information and orders that might be sufficient if you don’t need to manage a big sales team and process. Or if you are using Moday.com to manage project workflows, you might consider adding in their CRM module rather than getting a whole different product.

It is always valuable to look at your basic operational tools to see if they have enough functions to help you manage your customer relationships, before you decide to invest in another system.

In all these cases, if you are thinking that you do need a CRM, it is important to remember where you expect to get the value. Is it being able to grow revenue faster – through better capture and conversion of prospects and deals? Or will you get value in automation and coordination? Whether it is customer and sales information you don’t need to copy around, or communications that can be automated that you used to do manually? Or just your team wasting less time when serving customers?

Long before you have spent a single cent on software, we give you a clear view on the value you will expect to see. And then you can choose to invest for your business. Do you want some independent advice on whether on not you might need a CRM? Book in for a free, no-obligation call for an independent view on whether a CRM system might benefit your business.