“We want more sales!”
At the beginning of every client engagement, we like to ask, “How can we help you the most?”
The most common answer we get from almost every business owner is, “We want more sales.”
Why do we hear this answer so often? It's because it's the most difficult problem a business must solve. “We want more sales” in our ears translates to “We want to be around in the future.”
In his book titled Zero to One, Peter Thiel says it best: “Poor sales rather than bad products are the most common cause of failure in a business.”
The Flux Capacitor of Business
When we ask them to tell us about their sales process, it's amazing how often there is not a CRM in place, and if there is a CRM, it's just as amazing that most confess it’s not being used that much.
A CRM is a system for managing relationships with your customers and prospects. A CRM is like the Flux Capacitor in Back to the Future. It's a little engine that uses the fuel to propel the vehicle forward. In business, the CRM would be the flux capacitor and data would be like 1.21 gigawatts.
The Most Squandered Resource
Data is the gold of our age. Companies who grasp that data is valuable and have systems in place to collect it and deliver insights from it in order to make better-informed business decisions are companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple, to name the most obvious ones.
However, the technology for any businesses to take advantage of data in the same manner as the big boys are readily available. And yet, data it is the most squandered resource of most organizations we see. It's sitting in inboxes, or kept in the heads of salespeople, or on pieces of paper stuffed in a cabinet.
If you are like most business leaders who want more sales, your journey begins with choosing a CRM. The best CRM I’ve ever used also happens to be free. It’s HubSpot’s CRM.
*Full disclosure: We are a platinum level agency partner with HubSpot.
Be the Doc Brown for Your Business
The next step to take if you want more sales will be the hardest part of your journey.
The hardest step is implementing the tool and encouraging your team to use it. If you can pull it off, you are on your way. Even if you have the worst CRM ever, but your team uses it religiously, you are taking huge steps into protecting your organization from one of the most common causes of failure in business.
The secret to successfully implementing a CRM is to have a plan and the resources committed to a successful implementation.
If you can pull it off successfully, much like Doc Brown in Back to the future, you will have created a way to travel into the future with your business.
To learn more about how to plan a successful CRM implementation, sign up for a free strategy session here!
