Make CRM Your Own Personal Assistant

by SalesForce By Malachy Walsh

There’s no shortage of articles highlighting the important link between data and business decisions. And certainly, there’s lots to “ooh” and “ahh” about when you finally get a chance to look at what you can do with data today. It seems there’s no business question that can’t be answered quickly, no insight that can’t be delivered immediately.

But data isn’t just for big business.

As Mark Hope, CEO of Pegasus Sustainability, an environmental waste services company in Wisconsin, notes in the video below, even small businesses can get big-time insights with the right kind of customer relationship management platform. But for Hope, it’s not just about making better decisions faster with all your data connected within one system. With so much data at your fingertips, you focus on what makes getting into business so rewarding: customers. “Customers, as we all know, are complex,” Hope says. “Their needs are complex. Many need more than one of the services that we provide.”The challenge Hope and his team face is figuring out what each customer needs — even if they don’t know that they need it. But his company analyzes a customer’s segment, size, and geography, to help map out their specific needs. “Then we find an efficient, non-intrusive way to interact with the customer so that they become aware of the other things that we can do.

Hope broke down the vision he’s been able to use to guide Pegasus’ success even further.

Imagine a small business that’s using disparate systems — QuickBooks for accounting, CRM for sales, and spreadsheets for marketing activities — to interact with its customers.“When you or your CEO wants to see how did this marketing campaign perform from an ROI perspective, you’ve got to pull accounting data, cost data, marketing data, sales data from different places,” Hope explains. “And somebody has to create a big pivot table in Excel to tell you the answer to a very simple question.”

Getting to those answers quicker so you can get back to your customers is what success is all about.

With CRM, Hope says, “you can spend your time on other things. Not on trying to figure out, ‘Did this work?’ or ‘Did that work?’ You’ve got the answer you need and you’re back with the customer. That’s where money is.”

What would you do if you could get to business-critical answers faster?

Want to know how CRM can help your small business grow? Download our free e-book, Why Do I Need CRM?