What is a CRM and Should You Have One?
I don’t know about you, but I’ve heard the term “CRM” many times over since I first began experiencing the entrepreneur world.
For a long time, I didn’t fully understand what it was. From what I could tell, it was software that big corporations used to manage their sales funnels — essentially tracking potential sales from the start of their relationship through purchase.
Because of that, as I began my own business, I didn’t assume that I had a need for a CRM because I wasn’t really making sales. As my expertise in the world of entrepreneurship began to grow, I gained a much better understanding of what exactly a CRM was, and more importantly, why I actually did need it for my business.
And now, I strongly believe that all solopreneurs and entrepreneurs could benefit from having a CRM set up in their business.
So today, I want to dive into CRMs with you! I’ll talk about what exactly a CRM is, whether I think you should have one for you business, and what the best CRM options are for your business and where you’re at.
So, let’s get to it!
What is a CRM?
CRM stands for Client Relationship Management, and overall, its goal is to help you organize, manage, and track your clients and customers in your business.
Essentially, it is a database that holds all of the information about your potential, current, and past clients and customers. Most CRMs will give you, at the very least, options to house your clients’ names, contact info, and status in you business. By status I mean, are they a lead, a current client, or a previous customer?
More robust CRMs will allow you to store even more information such as birthdays, spouse names, anniversaries, phone calls you’ve had with them, files pertaining to each person, and myriad other bits of information that will help you optimize your relationship with them. These robust CRMs will also often have contracts, intake forms, and reminders built in so that you don’t miss important dates that help you to maintain strong relationships with your clients.
Good CRMs will also have powerful pipeline functions, allowing you to track the journey someone takes through your business. This pipeline will start the person as a hot lead and you’ll be able to assign them different statuses as you have consults or sales calls with them, send them proposals and contracts, onboard them, and more.
Additionally, most CRMs also have strong reporting functions that enable you to track, and therefore manage, your prospect to client ratios and overall client retention. A CRM can give you a lot of insight into your client-related numbers, enabling you to make important decisions for your business.
Now that you have a good idea of what exactly a CRM is, here comes the big question:
Do you need a CRM?
My answer to this will always be “yes.” I strongly believe that all businesses will greatly benefit from utilizing a CRM — even if it’s the most simple of CRMs.
At the very least, having a system set up that you can use to track potential leads, as well as current and previous clients, is game changing. Unless you are an absolute super hero, you likely cannot remember the names of all the hot leads for your business while also remembering critical information about your current clients, such as when they signed on with you, what their birthdays are, all of their contact information, and other specific details about their contracts with you.
Here are some things you can utilize a CRM for in your small entrepreneur/solopreneur business:
Track potential clients in your business
When did they first reach out to you?
Where did the outreach begin? (Email, social media, consultation, referral?)
If they are a referral, who is the referrer?
What are they interested in from you/how can you help them?
When is the next follow-up needed?
Follow them through the entire funnel from inquiry to onboarding
Current client database
House all contact information
Track when their contract began and stipulations of contract
Track your revenue from them
Notate personal information and important dates to deepen your relationship
View reporting of your lead to sales ratios, client retention, patterns throughout the year for lead ebb and flow, etc.
Manage all of your contracts, forms, invoicing (this is for more robust CRMs)
In short, a CRM can help make sure you aren’t leaving money on the table by missing out on important follow-ups with potential clients; allow you to build better relationships with your current clients, which leads to happier clients, and thus, lower client turnover; analyze important data about your potential, current, and previous clients, easing your ability to make big decisions about your business; forecast your business’ ebbs and flows more accurately; and much more.
For all of these reasons, getting a CRM set up in your business is one of the most important things you can do.
How do I choose the right CRM for me?
There are a plethora of CRMs out there for you to choose from. As always, when choosing a system or tool for your business, it’s important to remember that there are a lot of things to consider. What are your biggest needs? What is your budget? What is your comfort with learning new technology?
Find one that meets you where you are at.
If you want to start SUPER basically, you can always start with a spreadsheet! Yep, a spreadsheet!
A spreadsheet keeps away the bells and whistles and keeps your data clean and simple, if that’s your jam! Use one sheet for your current clients, creating a column for each bit of contact info and contract basics.
Make a second sheet to track your leads, with all necessary relevant info. If it feels overwhelming to start one yourself, simply Google “CRM spreadsheet template” and you’ll see lots of free or inexpensive options out there.
If you feel more comfortable going a little bigger and signing up for a CRM platform, here are some great ones for where most of our clients’ are:
Hubspot CRM (it’s free!)
Those are a few basic ones — there are a LOT more and a lot that can get bigger, more robust, and more expensive.
Another option is to use Notion. We use Notion as our CRM, but it does mean you either need to build it out yourself or hire someone (like us!) to build it out for you.
The benefit of that is that you can get all of the information you want to capture without having to compromise because the platform you’re using doesn’t have a particular field. The downside is that there are no automated reports, so you’d have to extrapolate the data yourself.
When it’s all said and done, you can use any platform or tool that you want as your CRM. Find one that fits your needs and your comfort level. I simply highly recommend that you use one because it can take your business to the next level!
As always, we are here to help. If you need help finding the right CRM for you and your business, reach out to us and we would be more than happy to support you in finding right tool for you!
That’s it for now! Thanks so much for reading.
