Your customers– and potential customers– are your business lifeblood. And if customers are the lifeblood, a healthy CRM is the beating heart.

Every business has some way of tracking its customers. Whether using handwritten notes, spreadsheets, or robust software, a business has a need to know who are their prospects and customers, what interactions they've had with those people, and how they can best leverage those relationships to help grow their business. Fortunately, years of software development have lead to a proliferation of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools on the market to help make this process easy, automated, and effective for your business.

A CRM can potentially touch multiple aspects of your business. Our consultants at GRAYBOX typically see this start with the sales process, understanding who our prospects are, where do they work, and what opportunities for business do we have with them. Talked about as salesforce automation, pipeline management, or sales tracking, the core idea is that a business needs a constant influx of revenue to continue to operate. That revenue might come from renewals or new sales to existing customers, or by onboarding net new customers for new engagements. A solid CRM provides visibility into the volume, value, and velocity of these sales activities across your organization so that you can effectively plan for the future.

Beyond sales, a CRM can also focus on managing existing customers. We're always selling, even to our existing customers, even if that selling is simply providing excellent service and selling our customers on why they should continue to work with us rather than start looking for alternatives. To that end, a good Customer Relationship Management tool helps us understand our existing customers so that we can better serve them. This understanding can come in the form of visibility to the multitude of communication and touch points in which we engage with our customers; in an understanding of their needs and preferences so we can anticipate what they may need from us; and through insights to how our customers are behaving as a whole so we can cross sell and upsell our existing customers on our products and services. Your existing customers are the most reliable source of continued and improve growth for your business, because they already trust you. A quality CRM helps bolster that trust through visibility and automation.

There are many, many, many options in the CRM world. Some are industry specific; some are very thin or lightweight; others are incredibly robust and sophisticated. When evaluating which tool makes the most sense for your business, it's important to focus first on what's driving the need. Are we looking for growth? for visibility? are we solving a specific problem? Deeply understanding what the problem is helps lead, potentially, to the implementation of a CRM as the answer. And when a CRM is the appropriate answer, the real volume of questions begin to assess all the specifics, and identify the right tool for your business.

GRAYBOX lives and breathes this type of strategy. Our consultants are excellent at digging in to get to the root challenges your business is facing, and helping identify tools that solve those challenges today, while providing flexibility to meet challenges of tomorrow. With such a wide variety of options available in the market, having a trusted guide to help filter out the noise and work with your organization to effectively execute on the implementation of a CRM to your business is invaluable. The GRAYBOX consultants would love to help.