The signs a business needs a CRM show up in small things, not reports

Hardly anyone decides to bring in a CRM at a strategy meeting. It usually happens after one bad week. A customer complains that two people from the same company rang him. Or it turns out that an enquiry from the website sat for days, because everyone assumed someone else had picked it up.

Events like these look like coincidences. When they repeat, they aren’t. Here is how to spot them.

The enquiry has no owner

An enquiry lands in a shared inbox, say info@. Two people read it, each assumes it’s for the other, and it waits. Or whoever saw it first picks it up, even though a colleague already handles that customer.

This isn’t a question of speed but of ownership. An enquiry without the name of the person handling it always depends on someone’s goodwill.

One customer, two salespeople

A customer receives two quotes for the same thing at different prices, or gets two calls on the same day. From where he stands, this isn’t a company making an effort, it’s a company that doesn’t know what it’s doing.

Sometimes the same mistake is less visible. A customer turned down one salesperson’s quote on price, and a month later another salesperson sends the same quote at the same price.

It happens when every salesperson has their own list of customers and nobody can see anyone else’s.

The customer knows more than you do

“You told me it would be ready by the fifteenth.” Perhaps you did, perhaps not. If the promise isn’t written down anywhere that someone other than the person who made it can see, the business has no way to check. So it gives way to the customer out of politeness, even when he’s wrong.

Business cards after a trade fair

After a trade fair or a conference, a pile of business cards ends up in a drawer. On the back of some, someone has scribbled what the person was after. A week later nobody knows who spoke to whom, or what they were promised would be sent. People who showed interest that day never hear from you.

The stand was paid for and set up, and people talked all day. Yet the most valuable part of that day, what was actually said, ended up on bits of card the size of a palm.

The business only remembers what was invoiced

The question “have we ever quoted that company?” only has a reliable answer if the quote became an invoice. Everything that didn’t go through, from unanswered quotes to customers who said “maybe in the autumn”, exists only in someone’s inbox.

When the same customer gets in touch two years later, the conversation starts from scratch, as if you had never spoken.

Old customers have to remember you

A customer who bought once and never came back usually survives only as a name in the accounts. Nobody calls, because nobody is responsible for calling. Whether there is any more business with him depends on whether he remembers you.

Three people, three answers

Ask three people how things stand with one customer and you get three stories. None of them is wrong; each person has just seen a different part. To get the whole story, you have to piece it together yourself.

With a small customer, that’s a minor thing. With a customer who accounts for a good share of turnover, it means nobody in the business has the full picture of the relationship.

The sales meeting is spent recapping

At the weekly meeting, everyone takes turns saying who they spoke to. Most of the time goes on getting everyone up to date, and a few minutes are left at the end for decisions: who gets better terms, who to let go, where to send a more experienced person.

When the state of play can be seen before the meeting, the meeting can start with the decisions.

When you don’t need a CRM yet

Not every business with customers needs a CRM. If one person handles sales, there are few customers and they have known each other for years, a notebook or a tidy spreadsheet is quite enough. In a business like that, a system adds work rather than taking it away.

What matters isn’t the size of the business but the number of people who deal with the same customer. While it’s one person, everything fits in one head and it works. Once it’s two or three, the small things in this article start to repeat.

If you recognise them, the next question is what to use: an off-the-shelf tool, a platform you assemble yourself, or a system built for you. That choice is covered in No-code, low-code or a system built for you: how to choose.

When small things keep repeating, the fix rarely starts with buying software. It starts with agreeing who handles which customer and where promises to them are written down. The system that holds that agreement together comes out of CRM and ERP system design and build, but the agreement has to exist first. If this article sounded like last month, tell us which of these you’ve seen.