A startup’s network is its lifeblood, and growing that network is key to its success. In its early days every component of that network matters – every potential investor, partner, and perhaps most of all, customer, fuels the dream of success. A company as big as Microsoft might not so much as bat an eyelash at a customer worth $100, but to an early-stage startup that same customer could represent significant revenue growth, crucial product validation, and so much more.
In spite of the potential significance of every relationship and deal, it’s remarkable how often startups fail to implement systems that help them do both better – all with the noble but often shortsighted idea of saving a few dollars. Notebooks, spreadsheets, and good-old memory might not cost the few cups of coffee a month that it might take to own a CRM account, but their haphazard and isolated nature often leaves startup founders struggling to coordinate, collaborate, and find crucial information about deals and contacts when they need it. If the recent startup founders that have since launched their companies into history had instead lost investor information and spent more of their time keeping customers and deals organized, who knows if they’d still have given rise to the world-changing companies that exist today.
Vtiger CRM helps startups overcome these organization and other challenges. Here are 3 reasons why startups should start using CRM to manage their contacts, deals, and information as early as possible:
Optimize growth investments with tracking and analytics
To know what’s working and what’s not, startups have to measure the performance of their day-to-day marketing and sales activities. To serve that goal, Vtiger lets marketers target and send campaigns and automatically tracks opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and more, logged to each contact. That lets you see how deeply each contact is interested in each of your content, so that you can refine your approach. Contacts that constantly click on links that educate them about an upcoming product, for example, might be ripe for direct outreach and a conversation about their interest.
Even if campaigns aren’t email campaigns, marketers can associate leads with them, and then do things like attribute future earned revenue to that campaign. For example, if you get a booth at a tradeshow where you collect some potential customer names, you can create that campaign in Vtiger and associate those contacts with the campaign. Then, a few months later you can build a reports that analyzes all of the campaigns you’ve run, and the revenue that’s attributable to each of them, so that you know which are working and need to be repeated, and which aren’t and need to be analyzed.
Sales teams, meanwhile, benefit from on-dashboard pipeline analytics that show them the active deals in each stage of their funnel, and can click into each deal for quick access. Is the pipeline feeling a bit thin? Then advanced forecasting tools can show sales managers how much revenue is forecasted to close in future periods, so they can identify if the pipeline needs more love. IF it does, additional reporting tools let them slice and dice leads and contacts to spot new potential opportunities. All this helps ensure a healthy and growing sales pipeline.
Manage sales employee turnover effortlessly
If we said “network” included all of the people involved in your startup – we might also include employees. Managing them, especially turnover in sales departments, often calls for complicated onboarding to hand old customer relationships off to new ones. That can be varying degrees of challenging depending on the systems and processes a company has in place.
With Vtiger, new sales reps can take on growing customer relationships in just a few clicks – ensuring a seamless experience for customers. Add that new rep as a user in Vtiger, and then delete the old rep from Vtiger to automatically transfer everything they owned to the new rep. This includes customers, deals, conversations, notes, purchase histories, and more. This ensures that customer experiences stay top notch, and revenue streams are protected. For safety’s sake, it also ensures that former employees no longer have access to customer or business data.
Save time and save cash to invest in other growth opportunities
If startups have dedicated sales and marketing teams at all, they tend to be light and agile. These high performing teams work quickly on projects that entire teams might manage at bigger companies. To do so, it requires intense focus. So, the more tasks they have to take on, the less focus they get to exercise, and this takes a toll on performance. Those means extra minutes sales reps spend manually logging call notes, creating post-call tasks, entering one lead’s information, and then searching for another’s, could mean less time spent preparing for their next sales call.
Vtiger automates rote tasks like data entry and retrieval, so that sales professionals can spend that time planning and growing relationships. Automatic data entry from emails, ready to use email templates, auto call logging, automatic task creation, and global search are just some of the automations that save time.
Because multiple people are typically involved in startup deals, tools that make deals transparent and collaboration effortless are also key. Vtiger’s on-record messaging tools lets teams converse, collaborate, and close-in on decisions with more crucial information at their fingertips than chat or email might ever allow. Speed, agility, and well-informed decisionmaking become the norm.
And while all of this is important, when businesses survive on available funding between rounds, spending hundreds of dollars per seat on sales automation software can be a nail-biting experience. Shameless plug for Vtiger – but our software typically does more than other CRMs, in a way that’s better integrated, and at a fraction of the cost of other CRMs – freeing up much needed cash to spend on other growth initiatives.
Have we caught your attention, yet? If you’re ready to dive down the rabbit hole, sign-up for a free trial of Vtiger to start using powerful automation tools to optimize your marketing, sales pipeline, and team productivity. Have any questions along the way? Feel free to send us a message at [email protected], or to call us at 877-784-9277. We’d love to hear from you!
