When Your Small Business Is Not So Small: Problems When Transitioning To A Medium Sized Business

Your business is like a child.  You want it to grow and mature, but as the company grows, you will face problems that you may not have anticipated before.  You will have more employees, and more customers, and coordinating data and schedules between all of the departments in the company is not going to be easy.  What you need is a tool that will help you to keep all of this information synchronized between different departments and different employees in the company so that your transition from small business to medium sized business as easy as possible.

Data

One of the first problems that you will have is sharing data between all of the employees in your company.  When the company grows, your employees will not know each other by name, and asking for information becomes more difficult.  This problem is exacerbated when they have to ask for data across departments.  The best way to share data is to use some kind of CRM, or customer relationship management, service.  These services create a customer database that is visible to every member of the company, whenever they need the data.  Now billing will have the customer’s phone number, as well as sales.

Meetings

Another problem that you will run into as your company grows is scheduling meetings, even just department meetings.  Where you might have been able to call an impromptu meeting before, and have everyone in the company be within earshot, the larger the company grows, the harder that becomes.  There are so many schedules to coordinate and so many moving parts, that meetings are almost impossible without some help.  CRM makes this easier by eliminating the need for a lot of the meetings that you need to have, and the shared information between the departments will make the meetings that you do have more efficient.

Oversight

Finally, you will need some way to oversee your employees efficiently and effectively, without running yourself ragged.  When you have just a few employees, you can easily see what each person is doing and you can take a personal interest in their activities.  When the company gets larger, that is not possible, and you will need more help seeing what your employees are up to and making sure that they are meeting their sales quotas.  CRM can help you forecast sales data, and give you concrete numbers to plan for in the future.  You can also use CRM as a project management tool so you can see each part of the project as it is completed and you can create a set of guideposts for your employees to follow as they work through each step.  This oversight tool will let you spend more time growing the business and coming up with new ways to innovate or provide better products and less time worrying about what each individual employee in the company is doing.

As your company grows, you will not be able to approach your customers and your employees in the same way.  You will need help to oversee their activities and make sure that everyone stays on top of their quotas.  With something like CRM, you will see more sales and more profits as your company makes the transition.

I am Jordan Reagan, and last year my company hit three hundred employees.  I found that CRM was the only way that I was able to have a grasp on what each department was working on and to ensure that the company was being as efficient as possible.  I landed on SugarCRM’s CRM solution, because of their reputation for innovation and support.  With their tools, I have been able to spend a lot more time on big picture ideas, and my company has never been better.