Matt* had client information in seven places: Xero, his inbox, Instagram DMs, text messages, two spreadsheets and his Outlook contacts, which he typed in by hand. He thought he had a system, but honestly, he had seven places to check every time a client called.
He’s far from the only one, and most growing businesses I walk into don’t have a CRM at all. The ones that do usually rushed the move from Excel, which means half the client data never made it across and the system can’t do the job it was bought for.
*Name changed.
Signs you've outgrown how you track clients
you check more than one place to find a client's phone number
a job slips because the follow-up lived in someone's head
one person updates the "CRM" and everyone else asks them
new staff ask where client details are kept, more than once
you can't say how many enquiries came in last month without counting by hand
If two or more of those sound familiar, the setup is costing you time every day, whether or not anyone's tracking it.
What we did with Matt
Before anyone touched software, I mapped how his team of five handled a client from first enquiry to final invoice: who touches what, where it gets written down and where it falls through. That map showed the double-handling straight away, with the same details entered in three places by two different people.
From there we set Salesforce up around how the team works, so every enquiry lands in one place and moves through the same steps no matter who picks it up. The result was two hours a day back for the business, time that had been going into searching, re-typing and chasing.
Do you need Salesforce?
Probably not. Matt's team needed something that size. A three-person studio could get the same result from a simpler tool set up properly. The software matters far less than having one source of truth that everyone uses.
Where to start
Write down every place client information lives in your business right now, including the inbox, the DMs and that one spreadsheet nobody admits to using, and count them. If it’s more than two, that’s your project, and this is the order I’d tackle it in:
Decide what you need to know about every client. Name, contact details, where the enquiry came from, what stage they’re at and who’s looking after them is usually enough to start with, and anything more can be added later.
Pick one home for it. That could be a proper CRM or a simpler tool set up properly, as long as everyone on the team agrees it’s the only place client information lives from now on.
Clean the data before you move it. This is the step that gets rushed, and it’s why so many CRMs end up half empty. Merge the duplicates, fill the gaps and bin what’s out of date before anything goes across.
Set a date the old spreadsheets stop. If they’re still open in a tab, people will keep using them, so archive them and make the new system the only option.
Make one person responsible for keeping it tidy. That person isn’t doing all the data entry, they’re checking that everyone else does.
Most of this sounds simple until you’re sitting in front of YEARS of spreadsheets and tools that aren’t integrated. If it’s been on the list for months, this is the kind of work I take on as a project, scoping it, migrating the data and training your team to use it, so you end up with a CRM that works for your business instead of another half-finished tool.
Not sure where to start? Send me an email at hello@loudhaus.com.au or flick me an enquiry here!
Yap again soon,
Blair
