It is hard to believe that in 2021, there are companies in LATAM that continue to rely on Excel spreadsheets to store their contact information and track daily activities. Discouraging data shows that regardless of industry, size, or corporate culture, our region continues to bet on familiar, archaic tools over innovative ones that offer opportunities for automation and efficiency.
Over the past 10 years, we have revolutionized the ways we interact socially with family and friends, how we consume political and economic news impacting our countries, and the methods by which we purchase everyday goods. However, we have largely failed to modernize how we manage our business activities.
Although most sales managers have heard of tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, or Pipedrive, relatively few know exactly what they are, what to expect from them, and their core importance in sales, marketing, and after-sales management within their organizations.
"Salesforce, HubSpot, and Pipedrive are tools known as Customer Relationship Management or CRM solutions. A CRM is a technology platform designed to support a company's relationships with its customers."
Its primary goal is to record, store, and manage information across all efforts invested by a company's various departments to communicate with their different audiences and execute core business functions (attracting leads, qualifying them, presenting proposals, following up, closing sales, and addressing after-sales support).
In conclusion: the Excel spreadsheets that almost all companies use to collect, store, and manage their operations actually represent only the first step toward the organizational efficiency that a CRM tool provides.
So it does not matter if you are an Excel guru who knows how to make the most of it; nor does your sharp memory, your detailed notes in a notebook, your address book with hundreds of contacts, or the email templates you copy and paste everywhere. All of these practices are merely the baseline in a transformation process your company could gain by implementing a CRM.
