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hello i'm helen armour and i'm the marketing manager at really simple systems today i'm going to answer the question of do i need a crm so no doubt you're aware of crm software and if you're not already using a crm system then maybe you're wondering if it's something that could help your business and whether it's worth the investment if you're new to crm then let me first explain what it is so crm stands for customer relationship management and generally describes business systems designed to help track your sales inquiries and manage your customer relationships and i should here introduce you to really simple systems and declare my vested interest really simple systems has been around since 2006 and we are developers and vendors of crm and email marketing software but just because we sell crm software doesn't mean we think everyone needs one so what i'm going to go through today are the scenarios where a crm will definitely help your business and where they will not a key sign that you need a crm system is when you're handling more prospects than you can remember if this is your situation it's very easy for things to get forgotten and you can end up losing sales because you've missed an opportunity if you're using a crm then you start to build up a timeline of your interactions with each new lead in your sales cycle so this then creates a full history of your relationship when you get a new inquiry the lead is added to the crm as a sales opportunity and you can then track it through the sales cycle and update the sales stages so that its value and probability of success will change as you go a crm system also lets you set follow-up reminders to contact each prospect at the key times so making sure nothing gets forgotten if your prospects and customers are talking to multiple points of contact within your organization it can be easy to lose track of what's been communicated over the course of a cell cycle if you're using a crm system you'll be able to build up a documented history of all your interactions with them and this will show you who has said what and when it's fair to say that majority of crm products are built for business to business market systems are designed around managing the account which is of the organization level and you may have one or more contacts for each account who will be the individuals that work at that organization it is possible to use a crm for a b2c but they're not ideal and you might be better off with just a simple contact management system instead but if your business operates in a mixed environment with both b2b and b2c the compromises will make a crm system worth the investment the next clue to whether you need a crm is whether you're looking for visibility of your data and this is just as important as collecting it so rather than relying on gut feel a crm provides the data that you need to make those business decisions so having recorded your sales leads and your interactions you'll have generated data that will provide insight for your business and if you want to run sales forecasts or review your sales to date or other business activities then the crm system will give you what you need you'll be able to run a whole range of reports on the data including the probability that sale will close and if you're running marketing campaigns you'll be able to see who clicked on your latest newsletter links etc i think a key one for me is if you're managing a sales team then you'll also be able to run reports to monitor your team's performance and enable a competitive environment for your sales staff to operate in so a crm system will show you how they're performing and score the value of customers that they're bringing into your business just as importantly though is the ability to protect your sales pipeline and with a centralized sales system you can ensure that if a member of staff believes your organization your pipeline doesn't leave with them a clear sign of needing a crm is if you have a lengthy sales cycle and this could be anything from a week upwards i was talking to a contact the other day who ran events and he said that they could often be chasing leads for years before anything came off if this is your business then it's likely you won't remember where each prospect is in the sales pipeline and what happened on the last call so a crm system will make sure you can easily pull up the history of the customer and continue where you left off last time and if you're running email marketing campaigns then a crm system has many benefits especially if you're using an integrated system the crm can hold your customer database to send your messages and newsletters but also it will allow you to create more sophisticated customer segments where you can personalize your emails but the best thing is that the data of how your contact responded and engaged with your message will be recorded back to the crm this will give you insight into your next mailing or when you next have the contact on the telephone so on this next slide i'm just using our company really simple systems as an example so we have some 50 plus new leads every day so far too many for us to remember and we're running crm system trials so people sign up for a 14-day trial and then we go on to the sales cycle after that where that can be anything from one week to six months so lots of variety there making it very difficult to manage those sales and we've got multiple interactions with our sales team with our support staff they're all involved in that uh process so lots of different points of contact and then we're also running marketing campaigns so lots of different uh interactions with those contacts that we need the crm system to record what's going on and keep track of everything okay so we've looked at situations where you do need a crm but when maybe you don't need one so there are instances where a crm won't fit your business and examples of this are if you're a one-man band or woman band and you don't have any sales staff to manage so you probably won't need one or maybe you only get a small number of leads a week so you can easily remember them or that you have a few large customers that you can easily manage and there's less to remember and then again if your sales cycle is short with no repeat business then you don't need to keep a record of the customer history and if you're selling b2c so especially via ecommerce here you might be better off with a b2c marketing system that captures sales history instead of adopting a crm system having said that though even with these examples you might prefer to plan ahead and get used to using a crm ready for when things to take off but what i must stress is that a crm will help you be organized but it can't organize you itself to benefit you and your colleagues will need to use it and keep it up to date if you don't then people will stop using it and its demise will be self-fulfilling however if you implement and use the crm system properly it can become a sustainable scalable tool and it will support your business and a lot for long-term growth on my final slide here i have some further resources for you to go to if you want to find out more so not all crm systems are the same and many target very specific markets but if you'd like to find out more and want some advice on how to choose the right crm for your business then we've written a white paper that you can download alternatively you could dive straight in and take a free trial of our crm like most crm providers really simple systems offers a 14-day free trial and we will help you get started thanks very much