Looking for a better way to manage customers to grow your small business? What you need is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. A CRM system is a business tool that assists you to do more with your customers by managing the customer data and provides a 360 degree view of your customers. CRM is not just for large enterprises. Today there are many CRM tools that fit every budget and are also highly robust and customizable.
CRM is helpful to small business owners in many ways. Some of them are described in the following points.
1. Building Relationship with the Customers
Building successful customer relationships is the cornerstone of success in modern business. It’s all about finding people who not only believe in your products or services but who are also excited about what you do and being constantly in touch with them to help them out with your products or solutions. A good CRM tool is invaluable in this process.
CRM not only make it easy for you to stay in touch with your customers; it also helps you to do business with them. It helps you understand precisely where you are with your customers, what things you need to focus on to keep them happy, and what obstacles you’ll need to direct around to close deals with them.
2. Better Use of Customer Data
One of the valuable strategic assets for many organizations is data. The data that CRM provides is only as powerful as the decisions that are based on that data. Whether right or wrong, those decisions can have a large impact on your business.
The real value comes from the analysis & visualization tools of data rather than just data itself. And hence CRM platforms offer a variety of native & third party tools (for example an online survey tool) so as to make organizations understand their CRM data and get unique insights about their customers like their browsing habits, previous order history, product preferences, etc. These insights can then be used to provide special discounts and offers that spur sales.
3. Increase In Sales
Increasing sales is one of the core objectives in CRM. An organization’s sales team can act more efficiently with a CRM. They can keep an eye on their pipeline and track the lead-to-sale process, review each other’s notes on customers and share product and contract information. A good CRM tool is much more than just contact management. It is a complete customer management tool.
A CRM can automatically prompt you at particular times to assure you that your planned action is completed or not. These actions can include calling customers, fixing up meetings with them or to check up on the progress of a deal at appropriate stages. Its impractical to expect to turn every prospect or lead into a customer. But with good CRM you can maximize your chances to do so.
4. Integration with Marketing
CRM is not only meant for sales organizations to track pipeline or bid-to-win ratios but now has been integrated with the marketing department too. A CRM tool collects and keeps the purchase history record of who has bought what, how much they spent and what is the future demand of such product.
Such information is useful when it comes to launching marketing campaigns to generate highly qualified leads that have a higher interest in your products and services. It allows businesses to track all aspects of their social media campaign like business owners can identify which networks are leading in the most traffic, what followers are saying about their brand. Email campaigns can also be individualized helping you better refine your marketing messages to target audiences, making them more convincing and impactful. You can also find correlations between campaigns and actual sales performance with the help of purchasing trends. And this will let you understand how your customers think and what campaigns cause the desired actions.
5. Automation
It might not be possible for you to keep track of sales appointments, post-sales actions or lead follow up. CRM software will automate many of these easily left out tasks. With the help of centralization users can retrieve and edit shared data about every customer whether you are in the office or anywhere else. With CRM software, everything you need to ensure effective follow-up and task management is automatically executed.
6. Scalable Management
The primary goal of any business enterprise is to grow rapidly. But rapid growth bring along with it several challenges. As it grows you need to be able to keep up with the ever increasing customer base, their requirements and all the associated process and data. CRM systems provide functionality that allows efficient sales pipeline management, minimizing the risk of missing opportunities and utilizing the available resources in the best possible manner.
