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Growing companies encounter various bottlenecks that inhibit growth and cause them to plateau. It starts innocently enough. Everyone reaches for a spreadsheet to make lists.
Things are fine while there are only three or four of you. Then the new hire in sales creates his own list of customers. Accounting hires an administrator who starts a list of office supplies plus her own mailing list, derived from the other customer and prospect lists. Pretty soon, you not only have confusion over who has what, but also management is annoyed that a sales forecast takes hours instead of minutes to produce.
This is a great article and quite true to life.
Small businesses should accept that at a point they will need to migrate off their spreadsheet. They need to check that their spreadsheet data is captured in a conventional format otherwise they will struggle to import it into their shiny new CRM.
Gather all prospective users of the CRM, and go over the points you mention above. But before evaluating a couple of CRM's from a choice of several hundred, read one or two good books on the subject to avoid expensive anguish later.
Perry Norgarb
SmallBizCRM.com
Small businesses should accept that at a point they will need to migrate off their spreadsheet. They need to check that their spreadsheet data is captured in a conventional format otherwise they will struggle to import it into their shiny new CRM.
Gather all prospective users of the CRM, and go over the points you mention above. But before evaluating a couple of CRM's from a choice of several hundred, read one or two good books on the subject to avoid expensive anguish later.
Perry Norgarb
SmallBizCRM.com
