I’d begun working for an IT security company as their VP of Sales & Marketing back in late 2012. The company was a startup, had about 10 employees at the time, and mainly serviced B2B sales during this startup phase. At first our main goals were just trying to get a group of 4 salespeople up and motivated as the brand name strength was low and sales were sparse. As time went on and we gained some customers and inbound marketing campaigns and strategies were built and put into place, it became apparent that the company needed a sales and marketing tool. I researched a variety of companies in the CRM market and found a tool that I believed to be at the cutting-edge, yet not expensive.
The CRM tool enabled our company to fully utilize the marketing campaigns I’d been managing by enabling a true customer repository for our marketing and sales funnel. The CRM tool would enable everyone in the company to have visibility of the pipeline, to schedule follow-up appts, to easily maintain a database for the clients, as well as a Kanban flowboard for customers while flowing through the various smarketing stages. I created the business case and took it to the company CEO for his review. Upon approval, extensive planning went into place for the SaaS integration. I managed the CRM’s onboarding process, configured the global settings, conducted training with the sales staff and other relevant management, and had to institute the CRM tool into my marketing campaign program.
The CRM was fully adopted within the 2 month estimate and the sales team began fully utilizing the tool. Management was able to see where customers were in the smarketing funnel, how much projected income might be realized, and enabled the sales management team to go after the low hanging fruit, the customers that were more likely to need our products and services.