Welcome to CRM for startups 101.
If you're a startup founder, CEO, sales director, or operations leader at a scaling company and you’ve ever lost a deal because it fell through the cracks of your systems or lack thereof then this series is for you.
You know you need something better than spreadsheets or you’ve outgrown your current CRM system, but you're paralyzed by the fear of making the wrong choice, investing thousands of dollars and months of time into a system that doesn't fit your needs, or worse, that your team refuses to use.
Maybe the CRM world feels overwhelming and complex. You know about CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot, but you're not sure what’s best for your business at its current stage. Perhaps you are already using a CRM, but it’s no longer meeting your needs as you grow, and the need to upgrade either within the same system or migrate to another one is becoming more and more evident.
Maybe you're tracking leads in spreadsheets that are already breaking under the weight of your growth. Perhaps your sales team is spending more time hunting for customer information than actually selling. Or you're preparing for your next funding round and investors are asking for pipeline visibility that you don't have.
Maybe you are a founder who's become the bottleneck in your own sales process, or a sales leader watching opportunities slip away because your team can't keep up with manual processes.
If any of this sounds familiar, then you're in the right place. This series is designed for growing startups that have tasted success but are now hitting the walls that come with scale. An let me tell you, you're not alone, the CRM landscape can feel like a black box, especially when you're trying to balance growth with limited time and resources.
In this series of articles we'll guide you through core CRM concepts and focus specifically on how those relate to scaling startups. We'll lay out what a CRM is, what problems it solves, explore the different types of CRMs, and lay out the information you need to make smart decisions about when, why and how to upgrade or implement a CRM system for your specific situation.