3 Reasons Your Business is Not Too Small to Use CRM for Small Business

Spreadsheets are admittedly useful.

They make it possible for an executive to consolidate and store what amounts to file cabinets of contacts, stacks of accounting paperwork, and whole portfolios of project timelines on a hard drive or in the cloud.

But when spreadsheets become too cumbersome to manage, you can be certain that it’s time to transition from spreadsheets to a contact relationship management (CRM) solution.

Below, I walk you through 3 reasons why your business is not too small to use CRM for small businesses.

When was the last time you heard about a sales team at a Fortune 500 company tracking their activity in a Word document or Google Sheet, or an accounts payable team at a Fortune 1000 filing invoices via Excel?

Answer: never

That’s because spreadsheets just don’t make sense when it comes to scalability, collaboration, or in-depth reporting.

Sure, more tabs, columns, rows, and folders can be added to give the impression of organization, but aren’t all of those additions just an exercise in organized chaos?

You can color code and bold and flag until your brain is begging for a break from data entry management, but if you’re trying to grow business then you know that the time it takes to weed through all that data is valuable time that could be better spent sending emails, making calls, taking meetings, and performing other high value tasks.

Here are 3 reasons why your business is not too small to use CRM for small businesses.

1. You need to extract actionable insights from the data

Unlike Google Sheets and Excel spreadsheets, CRM tools have activity tracking metrics you can leverage to stay accountable to your pipeline.

CRM tools also allow you to organize your data via pre-set fields and values, which allows you to collect and enter almost any type of data.

When you work as part of a team, it can prove difficult to stay collaborative with spreadsheets, since it’s highly likely that every team member is maintaining their own spreadsheets outside of any master sheet you may try to hold them to.

Even if you work on your own, it’s almost certain that you find yourself searching through countless folders to find what you’re looking for. This level of unproductivity doesn’t make sense when you consider the importance of using your limited time on high value tasks that bring in new revenue.

So, whether you need to organize your data to assess your sales efforts, to track activity for product teams, or to build lists for ongoing awareness campaigns—a CRM tool will help you keep all your data (and your team’s data) in a centralized location.

Once entered, you can leverage the data to make decisions of every kind.

But you must leverage it, because a CRM filled with all the data in the world is useless if you don’t use that data to your strategic advantage.

2. You need to organize your prospect follow up 

Managing contacts is probably the main reason most executives and business founders subscribe to a CRM for small businesses.

For sales teams, moving work out of spreadsheets and into a CRM like Salesforce is vital. Not only will the built-in task setting and auto-reminder features of a CRM ensure that you never miss a meeting again, other features allow you to know where every prospect is in your sales funnel at a glance.

For example, a CRM provides you with the ability to find all contacts who have not been contacted within a specific amount of time in order for you to know exactly who to reach out to. Likewise, your marketing team can see who should be funneled into a nurturing outreach program.

More importantly, you’ll be able to view the entire history of your (or your teams) relationship with each prospect. Thus, you’ll be able to better determine when it’s time to follow up again.

Can you do that with spreadsheets? Nope.

3. YOU need to be more productive by minimizing busywork

Spreadsheets can get numerous and cluttered.

Let’s say you’re responsible for sales. You likely have—at a minimum—a spreadsheet with a list of current prospects you’re close to signing, another for prospects who need initial outreach, still another for prospects who could benefit from drip marketing, and yet another for current clients who need continued nurturing.

To complicate matters further, you probably waste extreme amounts of time copying and pasting prospect info from sheet to sheet (usually in different formats) in order to move them around in your sales funnel.

Do you really have time to deal with this level of inefficiency?

Financial and operational teams experience the same wasted time since single spreadsheets can grow to tens if not hundreds of tabs that must be sifted through again and again. Which begs the question: who has time to waste while a massive spreadsheet like that tries to load…?

Do yourself a favor and switch to a CRM for small businesses so that your overall productivity gets a much-needed boost.