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- Does every small business need a CRM or customer relationship management system? Well, it depends. In this video, I'm going to help you answer that question and also show you the features which you may be missing out on if you're not currently using a CRM. Hello everyone. Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And a common question I receive is Scott, Should I be using a CRM system for my small business? Whether I'm an entrepreneur, a solopreneur, a freelancer should I be using a CRM? Well, if you fall into one of these two categories I would highly recommend you keep watching. Number one, if you are spending much of your time managing your business including your customer information and your deals and projects in a spreadsheet, yes, a CRM is going to be so much more efficient. It's going to relieve so many headaches that we often face when managing things within a spreadsheet. Now, don't get me wrong, spreadsheets are incredibly useful especially when it comes to accounting and finance and when we're dealing with numbers. But when it comes to managing customer contact information and then connecting that with multiple projects, deals and activities, spreadsheets tend to fall very, very short. Now the second scenario could be if you're managing all of your contact information and sales progress within a project management tool. Now you're probably thinking aren't project management tools designed for this purpose? Well, it's true. Tools like Notion, Click Up, Asana and many more look a bit like a CRM system. However, they tend to also fall short when it comes to making those connections. And as you're about to see there's so many other features that you may be missing out on if you spend most of your time within a spreadsheet or a project management tool. So let's dive into one of my favorite CRM tools and show you what you may be missing. Here I am within my Pipedrive CRM account, and one of the reasons why I highly recommend Pipedrive is that not only does it have all of the features that you will need, it keeps things relatively simple and easy to use. Now, when it comes to a CRM system, I believe that there are three key areas or components. Here we are on our deal page, which may look very similar to a project management tool that you are currently using or have used before in the past. This is where we want to manage our deals. And after I've made contact with this customer, I'm going to move them to demo schedule. We've got something on the calendar. It's a great way to keep track of where we are in negotiating or managing this deal. A second area is the activities area, because more than just the deal itself, what should we be doing next? Is it an email, is it a phone call? Do I need to send out a contract or an agreement? You can almost think of this section as your to-do list but the great thing is, is that it's tied directly to your most important projects, and that is your customers, your potential customers and those deals. But last but not least, is perhaps the most important part of any CRM system, and that is the contacts area. Now, at first glance, this may look an awful lot like your Outlook contacts or your Google contacts or some other contact manager that you use but there is so much more functionality. There are so many wonderful features here that we can use. Of course, we're going to track things such as name, email address, phone number and what organization they're a part of. And unlike a spreadsheet, even if you are managing multiple people within the same organization you can keep everything linked together. But let's go ahead and click on one of these individuals just to show you how much more power you have at your fingertips. So here I've clicked on this contact, and yes I've got my basic contact information here but beyond just the organization I can see a full history of my contact with this person. I can see exactly when we made first contact. About 10 days later, we sent the proposal and now fast forward to today, they have accepted the work and they want to start work right away. So I can see that history in an instant and I can even take notes here within the customer profile but it gets so much better than that because rather than jumping around from multiple applications, having to jump back into my email account I can actually email or even phone call this individual directly from within my CRM. So if I come over here to my email tab I've already connected this with my email account so I can give this a subject. I can start writing directly to this individual and hit send without ever leaving my CRM system. And CRM systems such as Pipedrive also make it super easy for us to create and make use of templates. Let's say in this example, I want to send an introduction. I'm going to come down here and select the intro template. And immediately you will see that the name of the customer is automatically input into this field. I can have as many variables that I would like here within the template itself, including dates, including quantity, including names of some of my products and services. But it's also put my name at the bottom as well. This is important if you do work with a small team and maybe there are multiple people who are reaching out or who could be sending communication. And because I can send email from directly within my CRM I can see that history here as well. I don't have to jump back into my email client and try and do a search and figure out when I last reached out. Here within my activity feed, I can always expand and see exactly what that message is and if I need to reply, I'm just one click away as well. Now, another quick feature that I particularly like here within the contact section is called the contacts timeline. Because when you are managing multiple deals and multiple contacts, you may want to see a history of how long have things been in the queue or when was the last milestone when you reached out to that customer. Here you can see I have my organizations listed on the left hand side. And then across the top I have the months of the year. And you can see exactly when I first made contact with this customer, when I followed up with a phone call and then when I made a final phone call attempt. And then on top of that we have some other helpful visual indicators. So red here means the date in which we lost that negotiation or lost that deal, but then we have others which have green and this indicates when we won that particular deal. I also appreciate that Pipedrive makes it really easy for us to add actions on almost any screen so we don't have to be jumping back to our deal page or our activity view. If I want to send a follow up here, I can select this action and I can add an activity directly from this screen. So less clicking, less jumping back between menus and tabs. And you can be a lot more actionable when you're on the screen. Now, jumping back to our deal page, we are never limited to just this Kanban or pipeline style of view. While I find this very helpful and easy to read if you are coming from a spreadsheet and prefer to view it in a list view, you can easily do so as well. And if we want to sort any of these columns it's as easy as you would if not easier than doing this within Excel or Google Sheets. But we also have access to some additional views which you can't get in other pieces of software. Here you can see I have a forecasting tab which again is putting some months of the year at the top of the screen. And since I'm in the month of September here it is showing all of my active deals and giving me a forecast as to what I can expect. At the top of the screen it's showing me that I have $117,000 of potential deals. These are potential customers, people that I'm still speaking with or hoping to reach out and connect with. But in green, we have $42,000 of deals that we've actually won. So combined, we have a potential of this number and then down below I can easily see the difference between those two groups. Here at the bottom, shaded in green, I have my won deals and here are the other deals that we still have the opportunity to win. Last but not least, let's take a look at the activity screen because this is where we want to take action so we can turn it into revenue, turn it into sales. So beyond just labeling your projects or your deals, you want to keep track of when do you need to make that next call. When do you need to make a final attempt or when do you need to show a demo of your product or your service. And again, Pipedrive makes it super easy for us to see things that are past due in red, here in green are the things that I should be doing by today. And then I have future activities that I need to be thinking about in the coming week. So if I need to send this proposal today, I'm just one click away. It's even smart enough to bring me to the email tab so I can immediately attach that proposal and send that email. If I come down here to my next item, which is a context call for a different customer, you'll notice that it will automatically bring me to the call tab. So again, cutting down on the number of clicks, the number of places or even the number of devices that I need to engage with, I can start making calls directly from my computer without having to pick up my phone. So if you're tired of wasting time in a spreadsheet or your existing tool, maybe it's time for you to use a CRM. You can try Pipedrive free for 30 days and Simpletivity users get 20% off of their first year. To learn more, click the link in the description down below. Thank you so much for watching. And remember being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.