What is a CRM system, and does your business need one?
Without a CRM system, customer information is scattered across different inboxes. Deals are in a SharePoint folder. History resides in the salespeople's heads. A CRM system consolidates everything about the customer in one place.
Hvad er et CRM-system?
Customer information resides in different inboxes. Agreement history lives in the heads of the sales team. Contracts are stored in a folder named «Contracts_NEW_2024_final».
A CRM system (Customer Relationship Management) collects all of this in one place. Contacts, appointments, communication and history, available to anyone who needs it.
For growing businesses, CRM is often what determines whether customer follow-up is successful or not. The more employees who speak to the same customer, the more important it is that someone actually has an overview.
When a spreadsheet no longer holds
When you are five people, you can keep track of customers with a shared contact list and a good memory. Somewhere between 15 and 40 employees, things start to fall apart. That's when you need a CRM system.
Three salespeople call the same customer without knowing about each other. The contracts in the SharePoint folder are from 2023. Some are leaving and taking with them everything they knew about the customers in their heads.
Most businesses we speak to have lived with this for a long time. The spreadsheet works, after all. Right up until someone asks, «What do we actually know about that customer?» and the answer is, «I think Knut had something in his inbox.»
Signs that you have outgrown the spreadsheet
The customer information has been misplaced. Contact person, appointment history and last conversation are in someone's inbox. A CRM links everything to the correct company, regardless of who was at the meeting.
Contracts are slipping away quietly. An agreement expires, no one follows up, the customer signs with someone else. It happens more often than people will admit. Automatic reminders ensure that someone always owns the renewal.
Pipeline is a mystery. Promising conversations are ongoing, but no one has a consolidated overview of responsibility, next steps, or how long an opportunity has been stalled. Management asks the sales team in a meeting. The sales team answers from memory.
New employees start from scratch. All customer follow-up is currently held in people's heads. It takes many weeks before a new employee can have an informed conversation with a customer. With a CRM that logs activity per customer, it takes days.
The common denominator is simple: the company has grown, but the way you work with customers hasn't. A CRM system solves exactly this.
Five principles we built Business Online CRM around
We don't have marketing automation, and we don't have an app marketplace with a thousand integrations. What we do have are four convictions about what actually works for Norwegian growth companies with 5 to 100 employees.
User-friendliness over feature-richness.
A CRM with 200 features that no one opens provides no value. A simple system that everyone updates provides a lot.
2. Integration with what you already use
Business Online lives in Outlook, Teams, and SharePoint. Not in a separate app that employees have to remember to log into. They don't change their habits because someone bought a new tool.
3. Start small, build up
Start with CRM. Add project management, quality system or HR when you need it. Same platform, no new implementation.
4. Norwegian Support
For a company with 30 employees, there is a difference between calling a Norwegian number and sending a ticket with a 48-hour response time.
"You need to keep track of which customers have received which offer linked to which project. With Business Online, we can better document the dialogue with customers and follow them up in a completely different way than before.”
See how Business Online CRM works
Try our interactive demo to get a feel for how Business Online CRM really works, or take the Growth Check to see if your business needs better oversight yet.