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Yes. There’s no argument. If you have customers, prospects or competitors, a good CRM solution can help you manage them and make more money. Without it, you’re just guessing.

Know what you want to achieve

It’s all well and fine deciding you need to keep track of people, but you’re destined for failure if you don’t write down exactly what you need your CRM software to do.

As an example, I use my CRM software to help me to track the following:

• Contact person and company name
• Addresses and contact information
• A brief overview of the company and it’s industry
• Whether this is a prospect, customer or competitor
• What they buy from me, or could potentially buy from me
• For existing clients, when they last bought from me
• A record of my communication with the contact, including my emails and conversations
• A record of the documentation/marketing materials I’ve sent the contact or received from the contact

That’s all. I know a lot of companies get carried away with data, but I just don’t have the time to pick people apart that critically.

On-demand CRM software

The most popular web-based (which I highly recommend) CRM software solutions for small business seem to be:

• Highrise, from 37 Signals (I use this, it’s great).
• Salesboom, which includes Accounting and HRM.
• Infusion CRM by Infusion Software.
• Entellium ‘powerfully simple CRM’
• Salesforce, the big daddy of On-demand CRM.

There are numerous other products out there. Other than web-based on-demand solutions, there are also a couple of open source CRM platforms and the more traditional boxed software systems. Most suppliers will allow you to play around with their products before you buy them, so try a few until you find the one that fits your business best.

Three tips before you start:

1. Make sure everyone in your organization has bought in to the idea of CRM. There’s nothing worse than a CRM system that 80% of your staff ignore.
2. Start with a small sample of your customer base. Your top 20 or 30 customers should be more than enough to test your CRM system.
3. Don’t think you can pigeonhole your information. Rather than giving up on a piece of software because it doesn’t have a specific cell or function for something you want to record, find another way to record it. I like the way Highrise is built because it lets me tell a story about my customer relationships rather than just having me blindly enter data into a spreadsheet.

This may all seem like a lot of work, and at the beginning it is. But you’ll start to notice how useful CRM software is after a couple of months, so stick with it.