Life… Before a CRM

It’s funny when you’re right-smack-dab in the middle of something, it seems normal. Entering data two, nay three times! Updating a calendar in one application, call sheet in a second application and proposals in yet a third application. Oh, lets not even talk about trying to cross reference the data!

A while back (quite a while back), I was selling granite for a fairly large fabricator/dealer. Clients ranged from developers looking for fifteen floors of granite to new construction, single family homes. This was my first sales role where I had to track information and create proposals on my own. The company gave you a basic Excel sheet to punch numbers in, but that was the extent of the “systems.”

Mind you, this was a company of at least forty five employees. And if my personal systems were not integrated, you can bet your bottom dollar that information wasn’t flowing through the company channels. The project manager used Outlook, locally on his computer.

And so the game of telephone began. I passed my information (that had more than one chance at human error) onto another person who documented the income and passed it to yet another person… literally. I mean, she got up, walked to the project manager and handed it to him.

Then the project manager typed it into Outlook. Every job was then dispatched (printed out) to a BOH manager (Back of House). That person VERBALLY gave the crews their orders.

I’m not kidding. We are talking about five sales reps, a sales manager, a project manager and five installation crews who functioned, ever so dysfunctionally, in the business system.

Like I said, looking back its comical, but in the moment, solid business practices.

I often think about what it would be like to go back and help that company out. Same players are in the company to this day, which means most likely, so are the systems. What would be the first implementation?

A CRM that integrated:

• Sales Pipelines
• Client Data
• Company Wide Calendars
• Invoicing, Receiving and Contract Creation
• Project Management (With multi way communication enabled between key departments)
• Service Desk
• Comprehensive Reporting on Critical and Company Wide Data

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