To follow up to my recent post on CRM, I asked CRM consultant Tom Wieczorek a few questions about how CRM can help small and midsize businesses. Tom’s company, Sales Automation Specialists, is located in St. Charles, Illinois. He works with several CRM packages, especially ACT!.

Please tell me a little bit about your business.

We’re a firm that helps small business sales teams get a return on their investment with ACT! contact management software. We also work with firms that use GoldMine and Maximizer. Act! is just our strong suit. ACT!, of course, is not expensive, but so many firms buy it (or several copies) and do nothing with it. We’ve found it to be a powerful tool for sales and marketing activities. So many firms buy ACT! and never implement it fully. We show them not only how to use it, but to use it to support their marketing and sales goals.

What are the 2 or 3 most important things SMB’s can do with CRM?

Immediately, they can maintain the calendars of the sales team, even if the sales team is a sole proprietor, and keep activities such as scheduling phone calls and meetings from slipping through the cracks.

Secondly, over time, they can build a treasure trove of information about the buying habits, tendencies, and preferences of their customers. This makes it easy to cross-sell and up-sell. They can track anniversary dates, birthdates, contract renewal dates, etc., in order to stay in communication with their customers.

Third, many firms want to build and maintain a sales pipeline; an idea of what sales are coming down the pike. ACT! and other CRM applications allow firms to put “hard numbers” behind their sales forecasts.

What are the 2 or 3 most common mistakes SMB’s make with CRM?

The most important aspect of implementing CRM is to have a plan. If you are currently unorganized and have no sales and/or marketing plan, CRM will exasperate you. It merely automates and speeds up the makreting and sales activities you have already planned. Also, and this is true with so many small firms, you need an internal evangelist. A leader that will spearhead the CRM implementation and lead the troops is required. The outside consultant cannot force the employees of the firm to use and utilize the software. The kiss of death is when the owner of the firm buys a copy of ACT! at the office supply superstore and tells the office manager, “Here–use this!” They just wasted $200.

Why do you love your job?

It gives me the ability to help a firm in a real practical way. We all have to make calls, schedule meetings, create quotes and proposals, and follow up. Once we’ve shown a firm how to automate these activities, they can be productive almost immediately. We get a particular sense of joy when a client says, “Wow! I didn’t know ACT! could do that!”

Anything else you’d like to share?

It’s amazing how a small or medium-size firm can benefit from an inexpensive piece of software. With CRM, all your interactions with a customer can be maintained historically. At a glance you can not only see what has happened transactionally with a client, you can see what’s scheduled to happen and over time develop a rich accumulation of information about them. And knowledge really is power. The informaiton is shared on the network by everyone in the firm, so everyone in the firm is a salesrep and everyone’s in customer service.

Thank you, Tom!