Giles Peacock

Onboarding aside, this is all about Data Hygiene and Good Sales Practice. The mantra should be: "If it's not in the CRM, it didn't happen." Notes from calls & meetings, emails back and forth, clear next steps, up to date contacts indicating the influencers and decision makers, accurate close dates, probabilities to close, competitors etc etc. It all needs to be in there, and up to date otherwise it's amateur hour. If you get hit by a truck, anyone should be able to pick up your pipeline. This is all very laborious but increasingly there are tools to make it streamlined. Mail client or IP telephony integration, AI meeting notes, links to finance, etc can all be implemented to save the poor typing fingers of your hardworking sales reps!

Honestly, most of them do the basics just fine and allow you to manage contacts, prospects, opportunities and tasks. A big question is how you intend to scale. If you expect to remain small (and profitable!) then a basic tool like CapsuleCRM works just great. If you expect to grow and need to integrate with various things and automate, use AI, etc then look at the top of the market, Salesforce, etc. The bigger question is how you use it. I'm a firm believer that the best performing teams do the basics really well. If you don't have a culture of good data hygiene and sales practice then you may as well save your money and use a spreadsheet. (And also pack up and go home because you're going to fail!)

Simply put, you need to CRM tool because the human brain forgets things. I’ve lost count number of times, I’ve had a fantastic client conversation on Friday, only just discover on the Monday that I can’t remember what the hell we talked about. Additionally, most CRMs will have some sort of task or reminder feature which means that you won’t forget to follow up in a timely fashion or return to agreed action items. Finally, when working as part of a team, you absolutely need that team, and your manager to have visibility over actions you’re taking or plan to take to try and close a deal. If someone goes off sick, and they’ve been working from a spreadsheet? Good luck on managing their pipeline!

If you are struggling to retain customers, online chat services are a good signal to those that are left that you don’t care about them at all.

It's a risk using it at the prospecting level since if you don't have a relationship with a prospect yet, it's easy to miss-judge an audience. I use it all the time in sales meetings and demo's though. As others have pointed out, it's a great ice-breaker and can make a 'scary' sales rep feel less threatening. Especially if you're willing to be the butt of the joke.

The best performing teams do the basics really well. Stay in regular, proactive, collaborative contact with your clients and the forecast will write itself.