Chapter 6 CRM Benefits for Startups By Greg Poirier Greg is a seasoned “startup guy,” having been an early- stage employee at numerous startups, as well as serving as COO in his last startup position. He came to Salesforce through the acquisition of Radian6, and he assumed the responsibilities for leading and implementing Marketing Cloud’s overall strategic online activities. Greg is a respected advisor to the startup community and now devotes his time to helping startups accelerate success through proven sales and marketing programs at his consultancy, CloudKettle. The following chapter is his follow-up to why startups need CRM (customer relationship management), which appeared in volume one of “The SaaS Startup Founder’s Guide.” This time around, Greg takes the next step and enumerates the key benefits that startups can see by using CRM effectively. He then goes on to suggest productivity apps from AppExchange that can be used by startups on Salesforce to tailor their CRM solution to the needs of a high-growth startup. You’re a small organization, you know your customers already, and you really don’t have that many to keep track of. A simple, shared spread - sheet can probably do the trick. Do you really need to be wasting money and headspace on a customer relationship management (CRM) solution? It may be tempting to set the idea of purchasing a CRM solution aside, especially if you’re a startup. After all, CRM solutions consume precious licensing costs and configuration resources. At a minimum, they require fees, but on top of that, they demand the most precious startup resource of all — founder attention during planning and implementation. 7171