5 signs your business needs a CRM

Every business starts managing customers in a spreadsheet. At some point, that file becomes the bottleneck. Here are the five clearest signs.

• Customer data is scattered and no one is sure which copy is current.
• A salesperson leaving takes the whole customer history with them.
• You cannot answer "how many deals did we close this month".
• Post-sale care is fully manual and often forgotten.
• Reports take hours to compile by hand each week.

What a CRM solves

A good CRM unifies every interaction in one place, automates repetitive steps and gives leadership a realtime view of the pipeline. More importantly, it turns individual knowledge into an organizational asset.

A CRM is not software you buy. It is how you decide to run customer relationships.

— Lan Phạm

But do not pick a CRM for its feature count. Pick the one that fits your real workflow — or build your own if the workflow is distinctive enough.