If you believe CRM is meant only for big enterprise, think again. We are a small and lean organisation of just 10 employees. Would you like to know why it’s working for us?

My Pain:

When we did not have a CRM

• Missed many booking opportunities for not calling the client on desired date.
• No single place to record the verbal and email correspondence of a customer.
• No consolidated list of today’s reminders.
• No ready reports available.

My experience:

Our journey

Way back in 2009 when our leads started to increase. The minimum process for any Service apartment operations is to have a log register and capture following lead details: Lead no, Date, Customer name, contact no, Contact email ID, Requirement, Remarks

This process is ok as long as the leads are 7-8 leads per day.

The problem in manual process begins

• When the open lead no’s increases some leads require a lot of follow up.
• When the number of employees handling leads simultaneously, increases.

Following were the issues with manual process

• Start of the day one had to scan the log register to create a list of tasks for today. At times there were manual errors due to oversight.
• Then one had to refer to two separate databases to understand the history of a case.
  • Customer notes made on the log register &
  • Emails sent to customer
• Getting MIS.

We then graduated to maintain Excel sheet, but could not go too far. We started looking for software. After a lot of discussions with friends I was advised for a cloud-based CRM software. Till I bumped across a software sales man and he was frank enough to admit that the worlds best CRM for Small business or Large Business and for any business is Salesforce. I just latched on to it.

I took a 30 days trial version way back in 2009. The support from Salesforce Gurgaon office was excellent. With their support team I managed to customize the CRM to our serviced apartment process, during the trial period of 30 days. On 31^st Mar 2009 I got a special deal from Salesforce & went live by migrating my excel database into Salesforce on 1^st April 2009.

The Benefits I saw

• The tasks for today were right in front of me when I logged in.
• Customers complete correspondence right from what we agreed verbally & thru email was present under the contact in a chronological manner. Easy for anyone to understand and take over.
• I had staff of 3, with almost 20 Telephone leads a day. Logging in shifts in single user Salesforce CRM and responding to the customers.
• MIS was available in a jiffy.
• I could shoot bulk emails time to time without worrying about my mails landing into customers spam as mails were being sent from Salesforce whitelisted IP.
• The whole UI and user experience were so great that all my employees were hooked on to it in no time.

But all this does not come easy

Success of any CRM is only when you drive the process from top. We could enjoy above benefits only when I drove the process as mentioned below.

Ensuring every lead is entered into CRM within 30 minutes of a call or email received: I had to drive my marketing executive to get into a habit of recording every lead in salesforce. Here I used to make their life miserable, if I found that a customer called and then he/she forgot to create a lead in CRM, they had it. As I had implemented a virtual call centre (Read more on How to handle over 100 customer calls using just one number in this blog post) all my customer calls landed in our call center for which I had a record and I would audit from time to time to ensure all leads were captured in Salesforce CRM.

Ensuring tasks are put for every lead to follow up: At times the leads were made but marketing executives forgets to put a Tasks. Once you forget, the lead is lost in the database. I developed a process that every marketing executive before he/she starts her day. She will first audit all mails & calls of previous executive in terms of have the lead been made, if yes has the task been put. The error tasks were created by auditor. And then the concerned executive knew what’s coming next from me.

Symptoms where CRM is not working.

Updating before the meeting: My cousin who have been working in big Networking company in Gurgaon uses Salesforce. He updates Salesforce once a week whenever they get time so that their boss could review the funnel every Monday. He also admitted that he used to show only those prospects which was enough to get his target. Honestly, this is unethical and a waste of time.

Updating Just to build database: Another friend of mine who is with a small IT company. His company uses Zoho. New leads are created in Zoho database. First introductory mail goes to the customer from Zoho by a marketing executive. Subsequently the lead is handled by the respective regional head in a traditional method, with no tracking in Zoho CRM. Zoho in this case is just used capture database only.

CEO is looking for ROI of CRM: Attended a salesforce conference in Bangalore. Attendees were mainly CIO & CTO’s. Their objective was to understand on how to present ROI of CRM to their CEO’s. I was a bit baffled and also felt pity on these CIO & CTO who were working with such ignorant CEO’s who should have actually believed in CRM to be a way of life rather than chasing ROI. A bit harsh for those CEO’s but I love calling spade a spade.

My Conclusion:

The Success in implementing CRM in my organisation was

• Belief in working in an organised manner as a way of life.
• Drive process ruthlessly and to the extent of even sacking people for not adhering to the process.

You are welcome to bash me up with your comments below.