Growing businesses require professional toolkit to manage their business relationships and interactions with customers and vendors.
Instead of sifting through emails and phone records, or maintaining a chaotic backlog of documents, scaling businesses rely on established customer relationship management (CRM) platforms for database management and report generation.
CRM vs. General Management
There is a staggering difference between a non-streamlined process and a professional management system. You might think your business is too small to use such software but actually, you are missing on opportunities.
For starters, opting in for a simple, niche solution is the right balance between organization and enough freedom – without complex dashboards and cluttered processes.
According to Salesforce, CRM can be a helpful tool for small businesses as it can increase sales efficiency and boost the productivity of your team by 30%.
Companies that don’t have implemented CRM usually deal with several problems:
- Unorganized data
- Time spend on manual updates
- Inability to determine marketing ROI
- Extracting data from several reports
Implementing a CRM will not only help you to tackle the above-listed problems but will also help you to scale your business. Still not sure if you need a CRM? We’ve listed eight reasons why small-medium sized businesses need CRM.
1. Building a Customer Database
Building a customer database is the foundation for all the work with customers and leads. You can collect email addresses, phone numbers, have access to purchase history and more.
When having your customer’s information stored in one place you can receive insights for your customers’ behaviors. The analysis will help you to pinpoint their needs and address those needs in powerful marketing campaigns that will bring you conversions.
2. Connecting With Your Audience
No matter if your business is small or medium the key to success is having a deep understanding of your clients and their needs. This will enable you to perfect the interaction with every customer you handle.
Over time you can identify and track the decisions that guided customers throughout the entire sales cycle.
You can use this knowledge to improve your marketing in every aspect – social media, email marketing, or even improve your website in terms of design and user experience.
3. Improving Customer Service and Support
Responding quickly to your customer requests is crucial nowadays. A survey by Clutch shows that 76% of people expect companies to respond to comments on social media and 83% expect brands to reply to these comments within a day or even less.
A powerful CRM platform will help your team to respond fast to your customer’s questions. Especially for small-medium businesses where they are still positioning on the market, excellent customer service is a must. Good customer service will not only impact customer retention but also your revenue.
4. Creating Effective Marketing Campaigns
When you centralize all customer information in one tool you have access to all the data needed to launch a great campaign. You can use the info for remarketing or personalization of your campaigns.
Personalization is quite trendy and a successful marketing approach because it aims to provide personalized content or offers to the customers. It is based on the previous behavior on your website – searches, purchases, interests, etc.
According to recent studies, 82% of marketers have reported an increase in open rates through email personalization.
5. Storing All Your Business Operations Data in One Place
Customer relationship management software isn’t just for managing customer data. It works equally well for managing teams. CRM software can also improve your internal processes and workflows because you can have stored there everything related to your company – information on competitors, data, company statistics, analytics in one place.
Instead of keeping everything in different spreadsheets and spending valuable time searching for them, you can directly generate reports and get insights for your company, your teammates, and their communication with clients.
6. Improving Communication Across the Organization
CRMs serve as a powerful tool for team management. Having access to what’s already been done with a prospect and what are the next steps to follow will be easier when having all this information accessible on your CRM.
CRM can improve your communication across teams. Imagine if a sales representative has communication with an important prospect but calls sick. And the rest of the team don’t have any details because the communication was handled via emails.
Integrating client communication in one place will help other teammates to step in when needed and continue the work on the project.
You will also have visibility on what everyone from the team has done and what else needs to be completed. Hence you won’t need spreadsheets or any additional files, saved locally on desktops of your teams and nobody can’t access when needed.
7. Increasing Your Sales
The key to any successful sales organization is the ability to plan strategically and make informed decisions. A CRM system allows you to track trends and change your strategy according to them when needed.
If you own an online shop and you need to launch a specific campaign you can use CRM as forecasting data in order to plan your marketing campaign.
CRMs allow your team to collect and organize data about prospects and deals using reporting features such as sales dashboards and reports.
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.
8. Reducing Costs
Having a tool where you can store your customer data, business workflows and company data will reduce costs.
Keeping the resource wastage to a minimum is an important goal for each company. Thankfully to CRM software, it’s easier to accomplish that. You can save costs in different ways:
- Handling most of your work in one system will put a big amount of information in order where you can access it easily all the time.
- CRM software enables the sales team to work more intelligently via dashboards where they can keep track of appointments, order, follow-ups emails, and more.
- A CRM tool can improve your tracking mechanism across different teams. Sales representatives could keep an eye on lead status, the marketing team can use the data for improving campaigns, the customer service team can improve their performance according to the customer’s feedback.
Wrapping up
There are various CRM tools on the market. If you are not sure which would be the most convenient for you you can try out Sales CRM. It will help you with better organization of your customer’s information and closer association with your clients and customers.
It has various features that can help you to boost your sales work and improve your communication across teams. This way you can make informed decisions about your business and marketing campaigns.