CRM Software for Your Small Businesses

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a software solution that brings a range of capabilities all together through a single platform and therefore improve customer satisfaction. It enables the organizations to archive customer details, send emails, generate reports, make calls, plan and schedule appointments, manage and execute a process, all through a single dashboard.

Its challenging for salespeople to gather customer information which are then scattered across the desk – call logs, sticky notes with some important information on them, while the overall schedule of calls and appointments are tracked in the calendar. In cases where sales team have to retrieve the customer information , they have to go through multiple sources to get that particular piece of information – this is not an efficient approach for a sales job where there is time crunch

A comprehensive CRM system accommodates all the customer data in one single unit. A gateway to improve sales productivity, enforce proper coordination between departments within the organization and therefore build a strong relationship between businesses and customers.

An effective CRM helps you do more with less – it automates the tasks that are to be done repeatedly so that the sales experts focus more on the selling and sales conversions while the sales experts spend less time on data entry.

Benefits of CRM for Small businesses

While organizations are at a pilot stage of setting up business, it is challenging to concentrate on all the aspects of the businesses. CRM is best suitable for small businesses and start ups as they can concentrate more on the management and business part while the CRM helps organizations to build a good rapport with customers and boosts the customer-business relationship. CRM features contact management, reminders and scheduling, pipeline monitoring, capability to track interactions, reporting analytics and combination of other platforms. Hence, it benefits small businesses – to help them grow to the next level.

Improved relationships with customers

The CRM maintains a complete log of all the phases of the journey from a potential lead to customer. The recorded insights might help organizations to identify the people, their demands and how effectively does the business work for them.

Minimal data entry

The CRM automates repetitive tasks like generating leads through sign up forms and sending emails to welcome new leads. It does not require manual data entry which saves a lot of time.

Effective Communication

The CRM system enables effective communication within and between the teams with no information gaps.

Healthier Pipelines

It enables you to envision the pipeline in process and it ensures you prioritize on what is important and work on it as per the requirement. Therefore the pipelines are not clogged and the workflow is streamlined.

Better and improved Revenue

CRM gives a clear view of your customers consistently – and this enables sales experts to up-sell, cross-sell at the right time with successful conversion rates and therefore good and improved revenue results and hence takes small businesses to the next level.

Effective collaboration to deliver effective business solution

The customer information stored in the CRM tool, can be used by the organization’s marketing team to perform marketing campaigns.

Lars Helgeson who is the author of CRM for Dummies says "Make sure you understand that journey and the data model around it, so you can understand what you need to store," "Then start looking at CRMs."