When you start your small business, you have to handle just a few clients whose details you can even remember like the back of your hand. But, a small business does not always stay small. Over a period of time, your business will obviously gain more customers and sales if it keeps on offering quality products and services at reasonable prices. Things change, and for the good.
Now comes the big question – How will you manage the information (related to the customers of your business) coming from all quarters? How can you create and maintain business relationships in the short as well as the long-run when your business starts to grow? How will you do all these and many more things efficiently? Thankfully, a CRM (customer relationship management) solution will be all you need.
1. What is CRM And Why It Is Important For A Small Business?
At its simplest, a customer relationship management software can be described as a database of customer interactions that can be utilized by businesses to help their sales and service teams and representatives improve customer satisfaction, sales, and customer service.
Customer relationship management enables small business owners to gain more access and visibility into their client base. It can also prove beneficial for tackling a wide range of operational challenges, including but not limited to high client attrition, sales decline, and operational inefficiencies.
Depending on the specific requirements and expectations of a business, a CRM can facilitate the transfer of customer data to the cloud. This helps the sales and service team members to efficiently communicate with customers, collaborate with colleagues, gather insights, and send personalized emails for creating and maintaining brand visibility and product awareness.
Without a CRM in place, a business would have to handle customer information and connections using the staples of the bygone days: Google documents, Excel spreadsheets, or Rolodex. Well, there is no denying the fact that these old-age things may still work fine for a very few businesses even now, but we all know how little they offer in terms of customer insight and scalability.
In short, CRM becomes necessary as soon as your small business has something to sell and as soon as you have customers with whom you want to create and maintain strong and mutually-beneficial business relationships.
Cloud-based CRMs such as Salesforce can be used to manage all critical operations and activities of your organization at the click of a button.
The best thing is that it is extremely affordable (Salesforce starts at $25 per user, per month) and characterized by a simple and easy-to-use interface.
The undisputed giant among CRM vendors, Salesforce is globally acclaimed for its enterprise deployments.
A small business can take advantage of its state-of-the-art and out-of-the-box features such as sales forecasting, contact management, workflow automation, lead generation, collaboration, and more.
2. Top 5 Reasons Why Your Business Need A CRM
1. Client Management
A CRM also helps you gain a deep understanding of the client base by letting you know what exactly works and what doesn’t so that your sales team can close deals quickly and efficiently.
A small business can also make use of the customer relationship management tool to gain more access and visibility into its client base. It can also be used for evaluating the available options before making decisions that can have an impact on the profitability of a small business.
Furthermore, CRM tools can also be utilized for formulating better plans that drive the employees of a small business to break new operational ground.
2. Extensive Lead And Contact Management
Lead Generation and Contact Management are of paramount importance to every business. Using a customer relationship management tool helps a small business make its contact management seamless and more effective. It also streamlines the otherwise-complicated process of lead acquisition. A CRM tool can even be more than just useful to let you pre-empt and automate your sales processes and requirements.
3. Profitability Tracking
CRM solutions such as Salesforce can also be used to ease up the work of the accounts team. The members of the accounts team with Salesforce on their side no longer have to worry about tracking every single cent of revenue or focusing on product discounts, client returns, and shipping costs. This helps them concentrate on the core activities and responsibilities assigned to them.
A CRM helps a small business benefit from a more accurate financial reporting and a speedy, precise bookkeeping system that are critical elements in the organizational value chain. When “value chain” is being talked about by corporate strategists, it refers to the collection of tools and activities that collectively enable a business to run efficient operations, grow sales, and post positive performance and results at the end of the financial year.
4. Sales Strategy
Have you ever imagined what would be the biggest mistake a small business can do to lose income and customers? Yes, you guessed it absolutely right – targeting the wrong customer segment and ignoring the right customer segment.
Through client administration programs, a small business can gather invaluable insights about profitable opportunities and long-term sales trends that help them adjust the results’ tactics and existing corporate sales strategy.
This helps them identify the best customers and the markets so that sales and marketing teams and concentrate on the right kind of audience to be targeted.
For instance, a four-year analysis of the sales data of a company offering janitorial services may show that its income from car manufacturers is on the declining side while revenues from colleges and universities are on the rise.
Based on this data, the company would then decide to target colleges and universities more aggressively and slowly pull back from the automobile sector.
5. Customer Service Improvement
The biggest hurdle before every profit-driven business is to attract, engage, and retain customers. And, the last thing they want is to lose customers by providing sub-par services to them.
A CRM system can do wonders to the profitability aspect of your business if you find that your customer support team spends a majority of time on customer complaints instead of proactively anticipating customer requirements, needs, and expectations.
Salesforce Service Cloud can let you provide reliable and faster case resolution by helping you deliver smarter service. Not only this, Service Cloud from Salesforce lets you increase customer satisfaction and resolve issues across individual or multiple channels with a 360-degree view of every customer.
Conclusion
By investing in a sales CRM for your small business, you can easily take out the mystery out of acquiring new customers and making more sales. A powerful and reliable CRM is all you need to drive your business to success.
If you are new to the world of customer relationship management, it is time for you to hire the services of a professional Salesforce Service Cloud Company or a Salesforce Sales Cloud organization to find out how CRM tools can transform your small business.
Author Biography
Ajay Dubedi is an experienced & Certified Salesforce Consultant who has assisted many Fortune 500 and other companies with their customer relationship management requirements.
Ajay has worked with clients to help them improve their technology and strategy for creating delightful and frictionless customer experiences. All these years, Ajay has remained extremely passionate about the Salesforce Platform and the awesome things that can be built on it – including a satisfying career!
Ajay is the Founder and CEO of Cloud Analogy that is globally acclaimed for creating innovative applications and solutions that improve business processes and increase revenue. Ajay is an active blogger with content regularly publishing on AjDubedi.com and guest blogs on Salesforce-related blogs and websites.
