When I worked at Marine Credit Union as a business analyst, I was also a product manager for the company’s CRM system. I then helped them to migrate to Salesforce’s CRM, but that wasn’t my first time administering Salesforce.
At Skinny & Co., as their IT & Marketing Product Manager, I helped them migrate to – and then later administered – their Salesforce installation as a Salesforce administrator. This involved working closely with IT and Sales departments.
How a CRM can help manage Sales
The CRM helped the company stay organized about their sales process and pipeline by creating a mechanism for salespeople to document their activities. While a CRM can be helpful to the company, it’s not always loved by salespeople who dislike filling it out, which is where process optimization can come into play.
People > Processes > Technology
Once you have the right people, create processes for what you’ll do when you get a new lead or prospect. Be prepared for when you get them. Decide what information you want to collect from your website using the CRM.
But you don’t have to use Salesforce for your CRM. It can be as simple as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, Google Sheets, Notion, or SugarCRM. The most important thing is to document all of your interactions with customers in one place.
What is the best CRM software?
BestVendor did a survey of 550 startup staffers — most in marketing and executive administration positions — on their favorite tools for email, accounting, web analytics, CRM, productivity, design, storage, payment processing, operations and so forth. Their answers, in aggregate, speak to the growing trend in startups moving toward predominately cloud-based operations, the most popular being Salesforce, which bested its CRM competition with 59% of respondents selecting it as the application of choice.