When it comes to sales, you are always juggling to crunch for those sales numbers and achieving those sales targets. Small businesses have to go the extra mile to achieve those targets and when businesses are just starting out they have a limitation on various tools and strategies to get them where they need to be.
When it comes to tools, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System sounds intimidating to small businesses & startups. After all, if your company only has a handful of customers, why do you need a dedicated process or system to keep track of them. But this is also a fact that CRM is an investment and as a business grows and starts booming that investment totally pays off.
A customer relationship management (CRM) system collects, organizes, and manages all of your customer-related information so you can track the buyer’s journey for every individual you interact with, streamline communication, enhance the customer experience, and improve data management.
Let’s take a deeper look at all the various ways your CRM can help your small business attain growth.
Increases Sales
When it comes to sales, time is money. With the assistance of CRM, your sales team can reduce time by automating the tasks related to manual entries of prospects details & follow up steps, CRM can help you to build a standardized sales process, you can see the big picture of how effective your sales processes are, which sales channels are giving you maximum ROI.
Increasing Sales People productivity: Companies that have implemented a CRM system that aligns with company goals have seen a significant increase sales team productivity
Improving sales efficiency: Prioritize leads and opportunities that are highly likely to convert and close based on customer interactions with your company.
Boosting sales effectiveness: Know which customers are engaged and the right time to reach out for optimal response.
Actually predict new sales: Having a more accurate sense of your win rate allows sales managers to dependably forecast how many sales their team will close from a given number of leads and set realistic revenue goals.
Reducing time to close: Instantly align your team on the next steps to close a deal when you have a 360-degree view of your customer.
An increase in Sales number is one step close to the growth of your company, as your customer grows, your revenue grows. Customer growth can position you as a market leader because practically it's a social proof that your product/service is already making a buzz in the market. This is one of the most important factors of why you should consider CRM for the growth of your company.
Get started with Free Hubspot CRM to leverage multiple processes, including sales, marketing, services under one platform.
Quicker Issue Resolution
If you have a problem with systematically organizing your customer activities, then you’re probably not using a CRM. Nothing eats away quicker at your small business’s morale and competence than when you can’t recall prior interactions with customers in order to solve an urgent issue.
CRMs organize all your conversations in a central hub so you don’t have to waste valuable time looking for the email exchange you need. Keeping all relevant emails, documents, and phone calls in one place will ensure you’re never at a loss for the relevant information you need.
These are some of the instances where the CRM system has resulted in Quicker Issue resolution, let's look at some of these instances specific at the departmental level.
Benefits to Customer Service
The primary benefits to customer service include
A single-view console for faster case management.
Access to the complete customer history to quickly answer questions and resolve issues.
Detailed product information through access to an online product directory with online query search.
Real-time access to customer services metrics through dashboards, reports, and alerts Management of service contract.
Benefits to Sales
The primary benefits to sales include
Prospect customer profiling to provide a comprehensive view of customer details, interests, and activities.
Lead scoring and account management to enable sales to manage the account as it moves from lead to close.
Opportunity management to enable sales to quickly determine where to spend their time for the highest ROI.
Territory and quote management to maintain performance and margins.
Benefits to Marketing
The primary benefits to marketing include
List management to create campaigns targeted at the right customer groups.
Email marketing campaigns based on deep prospect/ customer knowledge. Campaign templates to streamline marketing campaigns.
Lead generation and scoring to qualify sales leads.
Automated lead nurturing to develop leads into opportunities.
Social Marketing enables marketers to listen, engage, publish, and advertise across all social channels and communities.
The ability to measure and track email marketing campaigns to determine ROI.
Benefits to Business Leaders
The primary benefits to business leaders include
Measure & Grow your business: Business leaders can use CRM data to identify which markets are most profitable and evaluate how to adjust strategy in order to reach their goals.
Optimize Team Performance: Leaders can identify inefficiency in the sales process, ROI on marketing campaigns and determine if customers aren’t receiving proper support.
When you improve your customer’s experience with your brand, you’re building the foundation for a long-lasting, trusting relationship. Customer retention matters greatly for the overall success of your small business. When considering the factor of Issue resolution in your CRM system make sure you align it with cross-functional departments.
Better Process Tracking
With a CRM, tracking business processes is like a giant sigh of relief because it brings certainty to resource management. Instead of wasting time and money on the “see what works” method, wouldn’t you rather gain tangible insights into effective and ineffective practices?
You can not only determine if your process is generating the right amount of ROI, but you can also indicate where most of your revenue is coming from and how well your other teams are providing support.
Track your marketing channels to see where your most lucrative leads and sales are coming from
Tap into which website pages are converting the most new leads
Which emails are leading to sales conversations, demo requests, consultations or proposal requests
Whether or not your drip campaigns need more resources or touchpoints
Track optimal time and days to send your newsletters
Track the efficiency of outreach and the quality of your customer service
Your CRM doesn’t necessarily condense this information into a digestible summary. It’s up to you to track activity and to see where the holes may be or where improvements can be made. But, it’s a lot easier to do that with a tool that tracks every step of the process.
Identifies the Best Buyers- Personalization
Your CRM stores information on each of your customers, such as job title, industry, company size, buying cycle, decision-making process but can also be used to capture digital body language. This information helps further your understanding of your customer needs and allows you to identify patterns and offer products and services that more align with each customer needs for a more customer-centric approach.
Once you have a grasp on your buyer personas, you need to make sure your communication is personalized that amazes customer experience and make them a loyal customer. Your CRM system with integration of Marketing Automation software can play an integral part in this process.
Here are some of the best practices to execute this
Personalization Tokens: Your CRM systems contain a contact database with a lot of information about your contacts, you can personalize communication to your customers by using personalization tokens by MAP software.
Dynamic Content: You can create dynamic content based on user interests, their activities. Dynamic content thrills the viewer. Your database and the information stored in a CRM system play an integral role to execute this strategy.
List segmentation: Your subscriber list needs a touch of personalization based on a variety of factors and it depends a lot on how the CRM system manages contact lists and provides insightful reports on them.
This knowledge can shape how you offer support to your customers, how you approach new customers. All in all, having this information eliminates any guesswork tied to who you should be targeting in your marketing and sales strategies, which can lead to improved revenue over time.
Did you know that you could get Free Hubspot CRM ? Lean how.
How do you choose Right CRM?
For small business teams, some CRM benefits are nice to have and others are absolutely essentials. These nine features are must-haves for any business that is aiming to organize their systems and improve their efficiency.
Contact Management: The best systems that truly improve efficiency will reduce and streamline contact data entry as much as possible.
Deal stages: Most CRM systems can be customized to operate on a specific sales process. Whether your company has three deal stages or 15, you should be able to program these levels into the software and attach associated values.
Daily Dashboard: Salespeople need visibility into a number of metrics on a daily basis. Evaluate this function based on visual appeal & simplicity.
Task Management: CRM systems that include task management capabilities streamline salespeople’s day-to-day workflow and help them keep on top of their follow-up.
Content Repository: To cut back on wasted time searching for content, look for a CRM system with an embedded content repository. Look for a system that allows salespeople to save their go-to pieces of collateral in one place.
Automated Data Capture: One of the primary reasons companies decide to adopt a CRM is to keep a better track of customer and prospect touches. Look for a system that does this step automatically.
Reporting: A CRM system is only as good as the insights it provides. Be sure that your CRM provides reporting features that make it easy to export and distribute the trends that the system reveals.
Mobile: Sales reps have seen productivity increased by 15% when they had mobile access to CRM applications. Make sure you assess this factor when considering your CRM system.
Integration with Marketing Automation: A perfect integration gives you everything you need to nurture contacts into customers.
Where to start?
If you are a entrepreneur looking to scale your operations, consider the following CRM systems during your evaluation:
HubSpot CRM: Best for startups looking for an all-in-one CRM solution that fits their budget and is easily scalable.
Zoho CRM: Easy-to-use with simple user interface targeted at startups and small businesses.
Agile CRM: Great for startups wanting a mobile-enabled CRM solution.
Insightly: Ideal for growing for companies in need of a customizable CRM coupled with project management tools.
Streak: Good for early Startups with operations that require strong integration with Google Workspace and Gmail.
Pipedrive: Good for team collaboration, goal setting and goal tracking.
What’s Next
Now that you know how CRM brings value to your business, what to consider when evaluating different CRMs, and if your business is ready to adopt one, it’s time to start evaluating your options. To reap the full benefits of a CRM, you have to choose one with the features that are right for your business today and that can grow with you as your business evolves. Think about your company’s growth goals, and consider both your short-term and long-term needs when investing in a CRM platform.
You can get started with Free Hubspot CRM and leverage the multiple tools including sales, marketing, services under one platform.
If you still have doubts about implementing a CRM system and you are not able to decide which system will be right for your business, you can contact us and we will help you to get started. Our goal is to boost your company efforts through utilizing the right systems, setting the right priorities and ultimately setting up the process for success.