Why Your CRM Should Be Your Single Source of Truth

Cloud-based applications and services are as ubiquitous as the internet today. Research shows that nearly two-thirds (64%) of small business owners already have an average of three (cloud-based) solutions in place.

Take it from Danny Estrada, founder of E Squared, who said that “91 percent of North American firms with 10 or more employees already have CRM systems in place.” He added that “It’s no longer 10 years ago, when we sat in the boardroom and asked people why we needed one.”

The SaaS model has helped to democratize the use of cloud-based applications and services by building automations, workflows and business intelligence into platforms that were previously afforded by enterprise companies. Thankfully, that has changed dramatically in the last decade that SaaS has matured.

Now, you can harness the power of SaaS, or cloud-based applications, to automate and improve email campaigns, manage website content, monitor your sales pipeline, enable lead scoring and centralize customer data, just to name a few of the things you can do.

With multiple solutions, unfortunately, comes multiple data silos and in many cases, no single source of truth. In the end, you may end up with efficiencies and improved processes as a result of using cloud-based services, but data becomes doubtful to the teams not using that specific app.

To combat the issue, managers and teams spend numerous hours every quarter and maybe weeks at the end of the year to review their department-specific KPIs. This constant struggle weighs on the person within each team to extract the data and often another individual tasked with aggregating it and making some sense of it.

By the time you’ve been able to aggregate the data together in a meaningful way, you’re well into the next quarter or year. By then, there’s new issues your management team is tackling and the changes you planned to implement after the last analytics review have been long forgotten.

Instead of playing internal politics with which cloud-based application will become the designated single source of truth, let the customer decide. In other words, make your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) of choice the center of your company’s data universe since it focuses on what’s most important at the end of the day anyway; the customer.

The good news is that CRMs are one of the fastest-growing categories within SaaS and there’s even an abundance of those that are designed for specific industries, like eCommerce or wholesale distributors like yourself.

Industry-specific CRMs are great because they typically come with analytics and features that are business-critical to your day-to-day processes.

While even the best CRMs can’t do everything, which is why there are so many marketing automation or finance cloud-based apps that exist today, the one you choose should have best-in-class integrations in order to help you keep the tech stack short and the analytics easy.

According to the experts at CRM Magazine, a “Complete CRM” can help you:

• Drive better internal and external customer experiences
• Gather more complete data
• Improved analytics not only within your CRM, but across the board
• Spend less time training
• Avoid a heavy tech stack

If you’d like to see a CRM for wholesale distributors that will enable you to centralize data, fill out the form below. Tell us what your day-to-day challenges are and we’ll customize a demo to fit your needs.