Starting up your own company can come with many surprises, as I learned from my own experience. Some of them are welcome, some of them are simply overwhelming. The best thing you can do for the growth of your company is to remove as much of the guesswork as possible, I discovered. One way to do that is to keep your leads organized.
The success of your company is reliant on one thing- sales. As such, it is of utmost importance that you be able to act quickly on every prospective customer possible. CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, software is an effective way of tracking and keeping your leads organized. When picking a CRM solution, you must examine several factors, which we will outline here.
First, are you looking for an all in one solution? Sometimes it is sufficient enough to use a spreadsheet to track your leads. However, unless you are a one man show, such a solution is likely to be too cumbersome. Also, using spreadsheets can make it hard to keep leads up to date.
Next, ask yourself how you will be working. Will you be confined to an office? Will you be on the road? Will others need to access lead information if you are gone?
Will you need powerful tools in your CRM software? Some offer tools such as built-in emailing and scheduling that can be invaluable to your company’s productivity.
Are you looking for a Customer Relationship Management software solution that allows you, as a manager, to track the progress of your employees?
Sage ACT and GoldMine provide many tools that you need to run a successful business. Unfortunately, neither is overly intuitive and both have rather long learning curves. Sage ACT in particular has several downfalls to it. First, you must either set up a cumbersome server to house all of your lead information if you wish to easily share this information with your fellow employees. Then you will also need an IT group to make sure you have everything properly set up and to fix any problems you may encounter. The whole package can be a big mess. Second, the user interface is really hard to follow. It is a difficult process to just find the lead you are looking for.
As I grew my company, I learned a lot about almost every CRM solutions available. One, however, was head and shoulders above the competition. Blitz Lead Manager offers all of the features of any other CRM in an easy to use and highly intuitive package.
Like any other CRM, Blitz allows you to track the progress of your leads as you make progress. However, it even takes it one step further by keeping you alerted to the status of hot leads and, more importantly, reminds you to stay in contact with a neglected lead so that you capitalize on every opportunity. It also has all of the powerful features you would come to expect from a CRM software, all in an easy to use package. It allows you to send emails with attachments and to even save templates for future use; The scheduler allows you to add events to your calendar, and the calendars of your coworkers, with automatic email reminders and the ability to sync events with your Outlook; The “My Blitz” page keeps you up to date on the status of your leads and upcoming appointments; Campaigns make organizing your leads simple and easy; The Lead Quick Search feature makes locating a specific lead easier than the competitors. CRM also makes it easy to import your leads from a lead generation company, such as Hoover, Sales Genie, and Reference USA, by allowing you to import an Excel spreadsheet. All of this over a secure SSL connection. As you can see, Blitz has a lot going for it.
What really puts Blitz above Sage ACT or GoldMine is that it is a purely web-based solution. What does that mean exactly? Several things. First, it means your leads are accessible from anywhere you can access the internet. Second, it means that you are not responsible for the safe-keeping of your lead data. Rather, your information is backed up daily automatically by Double A Solutions, the developer of Blitz Lead Manager. A web-based application also means compatibility across all platforms, including Windows, Mac, and Linux. Last, a web-based solution like Blitz means you have absolutely no software to install and maintain, which further means you will not need an entire IT team devoted to making sure it is running properly.
When looking for a CRM software, it is important to consider all of your company’s needs. For me, the choice was obvious. I went with the software that gave the most and required the least. I chose Blitz.
