Novice CRM'ers

on 26 Oct 09 by Cheryl

If you have never used a CRM in your business processes it can take a little time to navigate your way through.  A new customer of ours who in starting a new small business has decided to implement Leopard CRM early in her start-up process rather than later down the track.  Her CRM journey is interesting to follow as initially she was not totally sure how best to manipulate her data in this new environment to get the most benefit. 

While she understands the principles of tracking sales against time, customers and budgets, she has always done this either manually with good old fashioned paper and pen, or with the more updated spreadsheet method.   As her customer base grew in the first few months she found both of these methods very cumbersome and time-consuming for many of her first customers wanted repeat business and this meant constantly repeating and transferring parts of her data between different spreadsheets. There had to be a better way!

Her research led her to investigate Leopard CRM with our 30 day free trial. She tells us now that while it took some effort to transfer her customer information and past sales data into the program it has been a learning experience that she feels was very worthwhile. Initially, she had some problems with realising that dates do matter as this is a major mechanism in being able to track your past sales and to forecast your future sales. Again, another learning experience when she had to go  back through her past sales data and enter in the Closed Sales dates. Like magic, suddenly all her generated reports in the Sales function magically appeared!

So if you are new to using a CRM take some time to to fully investigate the power that is available to you. In the long run, a CRM like Leopard will save you time and therefore money, give you an improved understanding of your business operations, and enable you to track your customers' engagement with your business.

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