If you worked in sales before, you know you can’t get far without a well set customer relationships management software (a.k.a CRM). If you have not worked in sales before, here’s my short essay on why this is something you want to invest in straight from the beginning.

Ensuring you have the right foundations is what you can benefit from largely later.

Why should I even care?

Perhaps, you are a small team, but whether you want it or not (hopefully you want it) you have to communicate with (potential) customers, investors, and partners. The requirements to do this well grow quickly - first you want to start tracking the list of potential conversations you had, then you want to track the number of people who signed up for your free trial/tier, then you need to email them to let reengage them. Lastly, when they reach out to you, ideally you want to be able to keep track of that too.

This is when a proper 360 customer view comes into play and why you want to set it up.

With your company growing, you will often want to ensure that you avoid trying to upsell your potential client while he has a critical issue that’s yet unresolved. However, having the support, marketing, and sales data all in different tools can make it really time consuming. Especially if those tools don’t talk to each other.

Ideal set-up

Sales perspective

In ideal scenario, you would go ahead and track every single interaction with people. That could mean sending an email, message, having a meeting. Each meeting could be well documented with notes, and next steps. Next steps would have a due date allowing you to keep the deal velocity in check. So whenever your Co-Founder or colleague would like to check where your potential deals stand, what to expect and when, but also simply just understand if it might be the right time to get in touch with the person or not.

Same way you save every single interaction with people in the CRM, the interactions should also be saved by themselves. What I mean by that is that I would recommend that you connect your brand new app to your CRM as soon as possible. This will streamline your process working with your (potential) customers so much. A new trial signed up? Great. Let me follow-up. Wait, what if he/she doesn’t respond to my first email? Even better, let me set-up an automated sequence to ensure I connect with this person and find out what brought him/her to my product.

Marketing perspective

One of the things you will likely want to start doing from the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey is building a mailing list. This could take a form of signing up for an early access, providing value in your blogposts and having people to sign up or communicating the latest upgrades to your platform. Initially it might be tempting to go for an e-mailing/newsletter. While that might be a good start, please, ensure you are feeding the data back to the CRM too.

I have seen situations before where the marketing team would send a newsletter, promise things in that email I have never heard, have a customer reaching out to me asking for it without further context and then having me going around trying to figure out where is this request coming from. Yes, it was an organizational issue. But could it be solved would I have gone into CRM and be able to look at what messaging was the customer approached with? Totally.

On the other hand - having your marketing efforts integrated together also unlocks the potential for you to be more wise with your money. Money you spent on marketing. It’s because you will be able to much more effeciently match your marketing efforts directly with your sales data and measure the ROI based on your campaigns and channels.

Support perspective

Perhaps you are in negotiation with a company that will potentially buy your product. As you read these lines, they are testing it. But if were through a similar process before, you know that a person testing your product (in other words the user of your product) is often a different person from the decision-maker and/or someone who will be paying for it. So what if you are pushing your buyer persona to buy, while the end-user have struggeled with a critical issue with your support team they weren’t able to resolve for 2 weeks? It might not be the right time to convince someone to sign the deal with you.

This is why having a copmlete transparency over interactions with people outside of your company is critical.

What’s next?

If you haven’t reached the 360 customer view yet - I highly recommend looking into your stack and data flows. It will simplify your life now and in the future. Bonus - it is not so hard to set up. Bonus no. 2 - It will help you save money by introducing further automations, and make money too. If you have any further questions, don’t hesitate to reach out and sign up for my newsletter for new pieces.