Tracking Sales Leads and Managing Customer Relationships – Feedback from Our Customers

by The ProsperWorks Team on September 17, 2014

Here at ProsperWorks we understand that developing the best CRM possible includes talking to customers to better understand their pain points and business needs.

So we do. Constantly. If you’ve navigated to this page in your search for an affordable and simple CRM tool, then welcome!

We asked potential clients a few questions, and they answer. Find out what’s important to them below, as it’s probably on your must-have list as well.

For those of you who have been with us since our Beta release – thanks for your valuable feedback. As you know, we recently launched our latest version with updated features. Keep the comments coming at [email protected]

We Interviewed Several C-Suite Executives – Is This You?

The following conversations with Barry, Monica and Luke are typical of the feedback we received. These busy executives are searching for a CRM to help manage sales leads and contacts as effortlessly as possible.

– What made you realize you needed a CRM?

Luke – Managing Partner of a digital database for book-sellers. The company has 2 employees in Berkeley, 2 employees in Philadelphia, and 1 employee in Australia. Annual sales are roughly $300k.

“Presently my partner has his leads, I have mine and some other partners occasionally have a few too. We have no easy way to pass these leads back and forth. We have no easy way to note what has been done for any given sales lead. We only have our own email threads. Using email was fine for years and may be fine for another year, but in the long run we will need to be able to treat sales as a “department.” So that we don’t have to rely on each individual to manage a given lead, but can pass them around and follow-up accordingly.”

Monica – CEO of a digital marketing agency. The company has 30 employees in Oregon and annual sales of roughly $10 million.

“We recently added 2 full time sales reps to our company and I wanted to keep track of their progress. My team already uses Gmail to communicate, but we didn’t have a way to manage our sales pipeline. I wanted an easy CRM package… a no-brainer that my team could use immediately without a lot of fuss and bother. And I wanted an inexpensive solution, too. Our needs aren’t large. Just contacts, follow up, status, etc.”

Barry – CEO of a software development company. The company has 4 employees in California and 4 employees in New Zealand with annual sales of roughly $1 million.

“First thing, I had enough leads that I couldn’t keep track of them in my head anymore. I knew there had to be some better way.

Second thing was that I could use an Excel document for that purpose, or a Google doc spreadsheet (so that the information is out of my head and shareable – and doesn’t go away if I get hit by a bus). But it’s extremely cumbersome to deal with a spreadsheet and it’s very limited. And I realized this after awhile and hence, started looking around for a CRM.”

– What are the key features you must have in a CRM tool?

Luke –

“I need a cloud based system with customizable fields for the tables in the database. Most of the CRMs I’ve looked at have a lot of default fields that are meaningless to me. I need to add fields for what is pertinent to my business.”

Monica –

“Cloud based, of course. I’m on the road a lot and I want to be keyed in at all times about possible leads. I also want to be able to customize my fields. I also want history. I want to look back and see what has happened to my deals over the past week or month, and even further back than that.”

Barry –

“I want a user interface and design that is very clean and simple. And I don’t need it to do a million things. There are a lot of companies out there that offer big and complex CRMs, and I only need a simple and small CRM. The simpler it is to use, the easier it is to actually make yourself use it. And if it’s an easy user experience, it can actually be fun. I need my team to want to use it.

I looked at one CRM where you could only sort alphabetically, not by date. I want to sort by what’s intuitive to me. There was no funnel. And you couldn’t assign stages to a prospect. The worse thing was the data was not exportable. You can’t transfer it. Now, I would never pick something you can’t export from.

I want to slice and dice and sort. I want to have flexibility about the labeling of things. My pipeline has 7 stages and I want to use what I use. I want to tailor the software to how I run my business. I don’t want to change my business to fit the software.”

– How do you feel a good CRM will help your business?

Barry, Monica and Luke –

“Keep sales from slipping through the cracks and increase our business.”

If you’re like any one of these C-suite executives, you are searching for a CRM toolbox to help manage customer relationships and track and organize your sales leads. You need a simple and elegant CRM solution that is flexible enough for your SMB needs, but not one with feature-overkill or one that is too expensive.

Stay tuned next week: Find out how ProsperWorks offered Barry, Monica and Luke a CRM solution that meets their needs.