Chapter 9 CRM and Content: Two Ingredients for Early Startup Success Use your CRM platform to track this information and position your sales team in the right pocket to expand to new divisions. 2. You already have, or plan to have, a dedicated sales team. Sales teams are critical, especially for B2B plays. But the most successful sales teams use CRM platforms that allow them to track all their work, store contact info on leads, and keep a history of where that lead is in the sales cycle. Then, when you finally reach that sale point, a good CRM solution allows your team to track contract changes — if it was signed, when invoicing occurred, and when to follow up on renewal. Can your spreadsheet do that? Traditional spreadsheets and corporate memory significantly undercut today’s sophisticated sales cycles and processes. Don’t sell yourself short. In addition to tracking sales cycles, a CRM system can track your sales team’s performance. Is your team converting leads to opportunities at an acceptable rate? How many sales are they making? How much opportunity pipeline is coming down the next fiscal quarter? Will it be enough to sustain your burn rate? These are all the questions that regular reporting inside a CRM system can help you plan for and answer. 3. Your product will require customer support. So you’re selling SaaS or some other digital product. Is it going to require support? Assuming so, how are you tracking this support? Where are you going to keep track of the support calls and inquiries you receive? How are you going to track which issues occur most often, so you can dig in and figure out what causes them? When you get support calls, where is your support team going to look up information (like previous support cases) on your client, so they can provide them excellent service? How is your sales team going to know that they shouldn’t make a renewal sales pitch this week because the customer has had three support calls and isn’t happy? In it’s most simple form, a CRM solution is a tool that can help you keep track of those pain points in a way that’s transparent and efficient. In short, it will make your life, and your customers’ lives, a whole lot easier.