5 Common CRM Mistakes

Customer Relationship Management is essential for small businesses. So much of your success relies on how you establish a report with your customers and make them feel as if the business is a place that represents comfort and quality. It is easy to make mistakes when handling CRM however, especially if you are using a computing system to help improve your relationships. Here are 5 common mistakes in CRM that as a small business owner you should try to avoid making.


1. Getting Overwhelmed by Social Media
Relationships are growing all over the Internet, thanks to social networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs and Twitter. While more relationships are good news for your business, keeping up with all your new friends, followers and contacts can be overwhelming. Thus it is important to be sure to capture these non-traditional communication channels in your CRM system so you can get the bigger picture on your relationships and help them grow.


2. Using CRM as a Micro-Management Tool
CRM systems are about improving the speed and effectiveness of managing customer relationships.  This means a CRM system should be for the Sales and Support reps first and management second.  While you need visibility and discipline, you can't have reps believe that the CRM is just a surveillance and measurement tool for upper management, or they won't really use it.  Additionally, the data will be incomplete. So you won't get either the effectiveness or the visibility you wanted out of the system.  The best thing to do would be to optimize your CRM system to save your sales reps time and hassle, so they can close deals faster.


3. Decentralizing Customer Data
Many businesses deploy their CRM without thinking about connecting it with the larger business. That can mean having to manually reenter data which slows down business processes. To avoid this CRM mistake, managers should tightly integrate sales and service applications with accounting, so you can accelerate, streamline and reduce errors from the quote, to order, to fulfillment and invoicing, through to customer service process.  Also, integrating your sales and finance systems provides the most accurate way of building strong forecasts.


4. Not Owning Your Information
When deploying a CRM system, you need to take the appropriate steps to protect your information from the start by setting up your system wisely.  Use the bussiness name, business credit card, and be sure that a business email address is used when registering the administrator on the account.  These steps will protect you from legal ambiguity about who can access the data, ambiguity you'll be thrilled to avoid if the employment status of the person who sets up the account changes.


5. Trying to do Too Much, Too Soon
Start small and gradually evolve your CRM system.  The most effective CRM systems are built out gradually so that they fit naturally into the way you do business. It's tempting to have a big budget and a fixed deadline but that approach almost guarantees a CRM system that doesn't work smoothly with your existing internal policies, channel interactions or business processes.  Also, don't worry about importing all your contacts in one fell swoop as soon as your new CRM system is up and running, especially if they are located in multiple places.  Instread, use an incremental approach to CRM implementation and expansion.  With the modern, cloud-based tools of today, companies can start small, taking on very little risk and proving the value of the CRM system to each team before getting more strategic.