Plan ahead with easy calculations

This article was included in the May 4th, 2016 issue of the LACRM Newsletter.

For a growing business, staying on top of a small number of leads and customers with a spreadsheet is simple. All contact details and notes are in one place, and you can go through and search for any particular person fairly easily. However, once you start to focus on expanding your business, simply having a record of your contacts isn’t enough. A spreadsheet lets you see everything that has already happened, but is limited in how it can help you track your leads. For Judi Watts, Director of Hampton Event Hire, she found herself always wanting her spreadsheet to do more for her. It was easy enough when she dealt with 40 bookings a year, but when this number jumped up to 300, it started becoming more stressful:

“For me, I want to look at things every month and see how many hires we had, how many were converted, and have these numbers in front of me. We used a spreadsheet for a very long time and had to do all of this manually -- which was extremely difficult to say the least. All I had were notes about the histories of my contacts and finding out things like the number of prospects I was working with at any given time was much harder than it needed to be.

With the CRM, I can pull up pipeline reports to see exactly how many leads I have, how many sales I’ve closed, and start planning ahead to grow my business further.”

-Judi Watts, Director of Hampton Event Hire

Tip to try: A CRM lets you look back at how your month went, and also helps you make judgments about what this means for your business. The more details you have with you, the more informed your decisions will be as you move forward. Try using your pipeline report to do some quick calculations to see what your conversion rate was like the past month. This way, you can learn a bit more about what you can improve to drive the numbers up next month! Click here for a tutorial on how you can calculate your conversion rate.