How business owners streamline a sales pipeline without CRMs

A CRM is only as good as how it is used by your staff. IF they use it. And there is one major reason why they might not – they’re busy making sales! A good exec is always hustling, and putting a stumbling block such as massive amounts of admin and paperwork in front of them is a sure way to kill productivity and motivation in one go.

However, any well-informed business leader knows you need to capture leads information and keep records of contact. Spreadsheets are finicky, don’t display well, and have issues with data input, especially from the field. Business cards and bits of paper get everywhere, or worse, get lost.

So you do need a CRM?

Not according to the folks at youdontneedacrm.com – they maintain that their system is the alternative to big, clunky software that takes salespeople away from their critical work. And they may have a point.

Can your lead tracking software do this?

The big plus about youdontneedacrm.com (also known more succinctly as noCRM.io) is the flexibility and lightweight nature of their system. The sales pipeline can be managed in a variety of different ways. To capture leads, you could, for example:

• Forward an email to one of the custom addresses set up for you.
• Scan a business card with the app on your mobile phone.
• Use their Lead Clipper to copy contact details from a website like LinkedIn
• Connect your website’s contact form directly into the system (saving a lot of steps!)
• Or just manually enter the details in via the software’s UI.

What do you do once you’ve identified the leads?

For a sales rep, keeping track of the sale’s progress through the pipeline could be as simple as moving a customer’s name from a column called ‘phoned’ to another called ‘met’. But while this process is kept easy, there are still plenty of options for sales managers to keep track of what’s going on with stats and team management features.

Investment in time

There are some ups and downs with this method of flexible work. According to some business software review sites, it could take at least a week to get comfortable with the software. The techniques are so different to a clunky and laborious traditional CRM, that it can take a while to ramp up your sales force. But once this is achieved, the system can fly.