In the end, selecting the best customer relationship management system (CRM) for your small business will come down to your needs. For example, is it more important to have software with more affordable pricing, or do you value the higher levels of personalisation and efficiency that typically come with a more expensive plan?
For example, firms encouraged by the greater expenses associated with the higher levels of customisation available may find that Salesforce is a better fit for their needs. In contrast, less effective CRM platforms, such as Hubspot, may need help to keep up with the demand as your company expands. However, it is something you won't have to worry about with this solution because it can grow alongside your company. Streak is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) solution that is easy to integrate, uncomplicated, and relatively inexpensive.
In general, ease of use is a significant aspect to consider. Because you will integrate CRM software into the day-to-day operations of your company, you will want to choose a solution that you and your employees can use immediately. There is no use in investing in a technically advanced CRM if no one can comprehend its functionality.
As the focus of each CRM software may vary, you should also consider the features that will be most valuable to your day-to-day operations. These will include tools for lead generation, project management, and integration with third-party applications.
Tips On Why Small Business Needs CRM
Customer Relationship Management, also known as CRM, is a platform that enables owners of small and medium businesses to manage operational challenges, such as client attrition, sales decline, and misalignment between corporate revenue targets and their salespeople's commission policy, amongst other challenges.
Recent research has shown that businesses that fully use their CRM systems can see an increase in sales.
As a result, if you are the proprietor of a small business, there are a variety of ways in which a client-tracking tool can impact your organisation's revenue.
Be Organised
As a small business owner, you can claim that you are responsible for managing your organisation's task management systems, business email systems, and calendar systems. Despite this, the fact is that you need to arrange all of your information under a single system to have a complete view of your company. CRM may help you learn things about your company that you were previously unaware of by integrating all of these activities and a great deal more into a single location that is simple to maintain and administer. Therefore, an awareness of the requirements of CRM for small businesses and a strong sense of organisation will always be beneficial to your company's success.
Client Management
A customer relationship management system (CRM) is a tool that gives you better visibility into your client base, which is another important reason why small firms need one. In addition, it assists owners of small businesses in establishing better plans and breaking new ground in terms of long-term profitability by encouraging them to consider various methods and approaches.
Track Profitability
A customer relationship management (CRM) system is a technology that can assist in making the work of your accountants easier. When you implement a customer relationship management system such as ConvergeHub, you no longer need to be concerned about keeping track of your billing procedures. Instead, it would be best if you focused on developing a strategy regarding product discounts, customer returns, and shipping expenses. Converged CRM solutions offer small firms a quick bookkeeping system capable of producing accurate financial reporting, a procedure essential to the corporate value chain.
Sales Strategy
If you own a small business, the last thing you want is to suffer financial setbacks because you targeted the wrong type of customer. Client administration programs, which are the core functionality of a customer relationship management system, have the potential to provide owners of small businesses with extremely valuable intelligence about future sales trends. This intelligence can assist owners in adjusting their existing corporate sales strategies and generating higher revenue levels.
Never Lose Your Data
Do you keep track of your company and client relationship information on the laptop you carry with you? If this is the case, there is a good chance that someone will steal or damage your laptop. A customer relationship management system (CRM) is essential for small firms because it enables them to do away with manual data recording methods such as notepads, calendars, memo books, and the like. Instead, small businesses can prevent data loss by using a web-based customer relationship management system or based on software as a service model like ConvergeHub. If you use a customer relationship management system hosted in the cloud, storing your data there ensures that it is secure and gives you a buffer against the risk of data loss.
Statuses Are Important
Do you know which of your customers are available for an immediate callback and which among them is not? If a company knows which of its prospects are expressing interest in its products and services and which of its clients are currently on hold, it will undoubtedly be able to improve or adjust its sales techniques. At its most fundamental level, a customer relationship management system enables you to view the status of your clients. Every time a small business makes a phone call, contacts a client, or communicates with prospects and leads by email or text, they need CRM. In your CRM, you will have the ability to easily change any information on your customers, including the status of those customers. For example, if you lay out your client journey, you may eliminate the need to follow up on inactive leads and instead focus on developing active ones.
You Need Metrics
Do you remember how many of your leads successfully converted into customers over the past few weeks or months? If so, please share that information with us. Please share some short data on your conversion ratio or explain the most fruitful approach your sales staff used to get in touch with your customers. The development of meaningful metrics is essential to the expansion of any company. You can always figure out these statistics by employing Excel formulas in a spreadsheet; having said that, the likelihood of you making errors when calculating your result is rather significant. Most folks do. The customer relationship management software may give you fast metrics on numerous parts of your company and generate reports tailored to your unique requirements.
Last but not least, it is strongly advised that a small business invest in CRM software because using such programs can enhance an organisation's customer care procedures. For instance, it makes it easier for your support team to rapidly reply to clients' inquiries and offer insight into customers' order trends. In addition, it assures that your support staff will always get order-related questions from consumers right.
Frequently Asked Questions
A lack of commitment or resistance to cultural change from people within the company can cause major difficulties with the CRM implementation. Customer relationships may break down and result in loss of revenue, unless everyone in the business is committed to viewing their operations from the customers' perspective.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology that allows businesses both large and small to organise, automate, and synchronise every facet of customer interaction. CRM system examples include marketing, sales, customer service, and support.
Low user-adoption rates are the root cause of most customer relationship management (CRM) project failures. This happens when your employees and other CRM users actively resist learning essentials of the system.
CRM is easy to learn because this system is mainly used by sales staff. The job of a salesperson is to follow up with customers and facilitate transactions. Therefore, sales staff use CRM systems to manage customers and improve work efficiency.
Three major types of CRM are analytical, operational and collaborative. But some analysts break CRM into even more categories. Examples of other kinds not covered in this article include strategic CRM (which is sometimes referred to as collaborative CRM) and campaign management CRM.
12 Key Benefits CRM Systems Provide to a Business
New technology comes and goes fast. These days, it seems as though a new app or widget every week is promising to make businesses and their sales reps more productive, efficient, and effective. Although some technology has proven to be more useful than others, one piece of sales technology here to stay is customer relationship management (CRM) software.
A properly deployed CRM system is an immensely useful tool. It tracks and manages all your reps' interactions and communication with prospects and customers. It also helps flag opportunities that might require additional nurturing or follow up (among many other things).
Maintain a centralized database across your sales org.
CRMs allow your entire sales org to keep all prospect information — over time — in a central database. This allows for quick cross-team access and the ability to easily manage all information via a shared location. CRMs help reps avoid spending time digging through files and records to find the information they need about prospects to follow up and close deals.
Manage all communication and interactions with prospects.
All communication, both internal (rep to rep) and external (rep to prospect), can be managed through a CRM. This allows reps to track all parts of the buyer's journey, including every interaction, email, phone call, etc.
For example, your CRM will help a rep determine if and when they need to reach out to a specific prospect. It will also help your reps remember whether or not they already sent a prospect the resources they requested.
Automate data entry.
With a CRM, your team will never have to spend time logging emails, calls, meetings, and interactions — all of this information will be automatically collected and aggregated within the system.
Additionally, a CRM allows reps to update all deals by the stage they're in — then, the system will automatically handle the rest (e.g. weighting, summation, visualization), keeping this process as efficient as possible for everyone involved.
Be reminded to follow up with prospects.
A CRM tracks all of your prospect activity, which helps your reps know when they need to follow up with specific prospects. When reps are reminded about specific follow-ups, they're able to schedule their contact at a point in time when their support is most helpful to a prospect. This way, reps increase the chances of converting more of these leads into customers.
Organize contact data.
CRMs allow your team to easily keep track of every contact (and their related data), no matter their buyer's journey stage. Reps will be able to see if a contact visited your company website, downloaded content from the site, or spoke with another member of your sales team already.
Additionally, reps can log notes from their calls or email interactions with their contacts and leads. The best part? All of this information is always searchable within the CRM.
Segment your customers.
Have you or your reps ever wanted to create a list of contacts to reach out to based on specific criteria? CRMs allow you to sort contacts by data you've collected about them over time.
For example, a rep might filter by location, company size, or deal stage. This way, your team members will always maintain a clear idea of how to position outreach for each segment, increasing the probability of conversion.
Create sales reports.
CRMs allow your team to collect and organize data about prospects and deals using reporting features such as sales dashboards and reports. These allow reps to better automate and manage their pipelines, deals, and contacts. They can also evaluate their performance and keep track of their goals and necessary work to reach their quotas.
Sales managers can use these sales reports to see how their team is tracking towards quota attainment and review the number of closed deals. VPs and other organization leaders can also monitor the amount of revenue generated.
Automate forecasting for your sales performance.
The key to any successful sales organization is planning strategically and making informed decisions. With the CRM reports I just mentioned, you can pull in key metrics like monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and year-over-year (YOY) growth, making it easier for sales leaders to identify trends and develop performance-related forecasts.
Plus, CRMs allow reps and sales managers to see which activities and sources are the most profitable lead generators for reps. This data helps team leaders create sales projections for upcoming months and adjust pipeline estimates.
Scale your sales processes over time.
As mentioned, a CRM will provide your sales team with one place where they can keep track of leads, prospects, and customers over any duration of time. CRMs also allow you to review specific activities like emails, calls, and meetings booked.
Sales managers can then use this data to identify patterns and see which sales processes are working for their team and which ones could be improved — which is how your sales team can use information stored in the CRM to scale your processes as your business grows.
Ensure team communication is facilitated.
Ensure effective team communication is facilitated throughout your sales org and among reps with the help of the CRM. This communication is critical to maintain a specific brand image among all reps who are interacting with prospects and ensure reps are learning from each other and working together to reach quota.
With a CRM, your team can tag reps and managers members on specific deals they want to bring them onto. Sales leaders and reps can also use the system to reassign specific leads by clicking a button. Lastly, reps don't need to leave the system to write and send emails to team members to have these discussions — instead, all communication can be facilitated easily from within the CRM.
Keep the same software as your company grows.
As your company grows, a CRM will grow with you — that's the beauty of this type of software. So whether it's tracking more leads, organizing more contact information, or recording a greater number of interactions with prospects, CRMs are meant to grow alongside your business.
And this isn't just true for your sales org — your CRM can assist other teams within your organization as you grow. Examples include customer service and marketing — these teams can pull from your prospect information to contact them, personalize content for them, tailor CTAs and product details towards their needs, and more.
Make administrative tasks efficient.
All of your administrative tasks — such as manual data entry, hunting for email chains, recording conversations, and saving contact information — will be simplified with the implementation of a CRM.
In fact, a CRM automates a lot of these tasks so reps can spend their time and resources on more impactful tasks. Even though administrative tasks might not directly impact revenue, they impact the schedules of members of your sales org and how much time they spend on working on those tasks versus with leads and prospects.
And in case your sales org needs additional convincing to adopt a CRM, here are five more statistics that further prove their value:
- The average CRM user adoption among sales reps is 73%, and the average ROI period is 13 months.
- 91% of businesses with more than 11 employees already use a CRM.
- A CRM can help you increase sales by up to 30%.
- CRMs help you improve customer retention and satisfaction rates.
- CRMs improve data accessibility which shortens your sales cycle.