Hands up if you have ever used the sentence "I need more hours in my day"? And now if you often feel that you finish the day with a longer to-do list than the one you had at the beginning?

Lacking time to do things is certainly a common factor across all businesses, and one that can actually cause quite a lot of harm both to the company and the person itself. On a personal point of view, it can raise stress levels and cause serious health issues, plus having to work all the time will ultimately degrade your personal relationships. On a business level, a stressed workforce will be a lot less productive and harmful to the business, plus it means that you don't have time to implement new ideas that are vital for your business growth.

Here are some ideas that will help you freeing up your time and focus it on what really matter, such as growing your business or spending more time with your family!

The inter-web is a busy, competitive place, and certainly one where poor design and naff, annoying messages are punished by the ultimate judge of all. The User. 

Getting your content noticed within Google in the first instance is the difficultly straight off the bat. But lets say - for this blog's sake if nothing else - that you have nailed your Search Engine Optimisation.

Your meta tags, image tags, H1/ H2 headings and structure are all a gorgeous example of SEO to digital marketers the world over. Hurrah! Your site appears on the first page of Google results. Leads, customers and riches are surely coming your way... Nope, not yet.

Most companies have a customer relationship management (CRM) system in place, but they are really struggling to keep it updated and using it effectively to work for them. I hear it all too often from sales and marketing managers about their struggle with getting people that are out in the field to effectively update it, and lamenting the fact that for this reason their CRM is, more often than not, not performing as well as it should.

Why is a CRM strategy important?

• Make decisions based on leads' pipeline.
• More communication of the right information to the right person at the right time.
• Gain a better understanding of who your best customers are. Differentiate between the customers who provide the highest profit margins and those that simply bring you the most revenue. You could use that information to provide them a better type or tier of customer service for better customers, as Inc. explains.
• Spot potential high-value customers so that you can make the most of your sales opportunities with them and lower the cost of selling to others that are not engaging as much.

The importance of the CRM I think is easily understood by most companies, but even if you have the most advanced system in the world, if you can't get your team onboard and using it every day, it will be all for nothing.

Here is how to have an effective CRM strategy in place to make sure it really works for your company.