Krzysztof Balicki runs Web Systems, the company that builds and develops EpicCRM. He writes about CRM and sales from the perspective of a team that builds and maintains these tools itself.
Good sales meeting preparation takes about ten minutes in the CRM. Read the last note, then look at open tickets, contract dates, the people involved, the deal and any unpaid invoices. After that, check a few sources outside the system and pick one goal for the call. Sounds obvious, right? But with back-to-back calls this […]
Before you buy help desk software for small business, ask each vendor nine questions about tickets, customer context, pricing, data and upkeep. Brand rankings? They won’t help much here. Picture a 10-person B2B service company with one shared support inbox. Emails get lost, answered twice, or never answered at all. Sound familiar? Small teams rarely […]
A data breach response plan for a small company hands five jobs (contain, assess, notify, record and fix) to named people. That way nobody is guessing who does what in the first few hours. And the trigger can be anything: a laptop left on a train, a hijacked mailbox sending invoices to your clients, a […]
Customer win-back means finding clients who quietly stopped ordering, working out why they went silent and getting back in touch with a personal, specific reason to talk again. Most small B2B firms know how this goes. Accounts that used to order like clockwork just faded. No complaint, no goodbye. And nobody ever picked up the […]
For a small team, five to seven ticket categories is usually plenty. Each one names the type of request and nothing else. Every ticket gets exactly one, and it’s set the first time someone triages the ticket. Say your help desk shows fifty open tickets and nobody can tell you how many are bugs, billing […]
A customer journey map for a small B2B firm is one page. It shows every contact a client has with you, from the first call to the renewal, with a named owner beside each step. Most owners can tell you exactly how deals get won. What happens after the contract is signed? That’s hazier. The […]
In a small team, your sales playbook should first cover these things: who you sell to, how a deal moves from first contact to close, which questions qualify a lead, and how to answer the objections you hear most. Everything else can wait. You probably know the usual problem already. Two to eight reps, each […]
Key account management means picking the few clients your business really depends on and giving each one a named owner, a written plan and a regular review. That way they stop sitting in the same queue as everyone else. And plenty of small B2B firms have exactly this problem: a handful of clients bring in […]
The Cyber Resilience Act reporting rules put new duties on manufacturers. Not on the small companies that buy their products. But they do hand you, the buyer, a solid excuse to ask every vendor one thing: how will news of a flaw and its fix actually reach us? What follows is the customer’s side of […]
Run a CRM pilot with one team on real deals before rolling out to everyone. Most CRM budgets quietly disappear in the gap between buying a system and getting people to use it, and the usual culprit is scale: you roll out to everyone at once, on a schedule set by the contract rather than […]