Having a CRM is crucial for any business, small or large. CRMs are there to help your sales and customer success team create long lasting relationships with clients and partners. However, a CRM tool is not a miraculous product that will simply increase sales overnight. It takes time and commitment, but it also takes finding the right CRM for your team. The best CRMs will take relationship management beyond just ‘contact management’ and will help you build quality relationships over time, instead of treating each contact as a transaction. Below are 4 points to keep in mind on why you need a CRM for your small businesses:
1. Becoming proactive
Ever wish you could look into the future? With a good CRM, you can do just that, especially when considering client requests and projects. It’s no longer all about closing the sale or managing a lead. Instead, having a good CRM will help you manage a customer’s entire journey through your business. This allows you to start identifying and becoming proactive with managing customers. Most cloud based CRMs offer features such as client dashboard views, contact tracking, project tracking etc.; that help you track your progress over time. This will help your team become proactive and help analyze your business’ current practices and set future customer goals.
2. A clear sales pipeline
Build a window into each client relationship. With a great CRM, you can gain the ability to look into each customer’s journey and see where and why each sale failed or succeeded. This will provide some of the most sought after answers to your own unique challenges that no amount of external analysis could provide. When implemented well and maintained regularly, your CRM can help you gather important data such as leaks in your sales funnel, customer type behavior, the results of your actions with clients, communication frequency information, etc. After all, knowing the problem is half the battle!
3. Simplify your processes
A good CRM should help you simplify processes, not add to it. Many CRM’s available today have a bad reputation for being too cumbersome to implement due to the difficulty in transferring data. But, with the rise in cloud-based solutions such as Simplifyd and ConvergeHub, the implementation and ongoing management of your CRM becomes more intuitive and easier. For an example importing your contacts can now be done via a CSV file or through your Google and Outlook contacts. This gives you a solid starting point to jump start your implementation. Cloud-based CRM’s have made it so easy that in fact, you don’t even need to call the IT guy anymore!
4. Integration of other applications you use
Modern cloud-based CRMs are taking client relationship management to another level by offering integration with apps such as Google Drive, Paypal, Slack, and more. Just imagine how much more efficient your team will be using a CRM tool like SImplifyd which allows you to manage a lead, generate sales, filter projects to clients, and send an invoice, all from one platform.
All businesses need a CRM, but small businesses stand to gain the most. With constant technology improvements, cloud-based CRM’s will give you access to innovative CRM features to continually improve how you manage your contacts, helping you build and strengthen client relationships for long term success.
