Great ideas and hard work keep businesses afloat- but data makes them succeed. Having access to what your customers need, their purchasing behavior, and what they deem valuable to their everyday life gives you limitless options on how you can expand and improve your business; and one of the things that can help you with that is CRM.
CRM or Customer Relationship Management, is the tools and techniques that you use to create a strong relationship with your customers- making it easy for you to maintain your existing customers and gather new clients.
If you are familiar with how offices work, there are three departments that handle customers: Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service. These people deal with your customers everyday- find ways to advertise your products in the most cost-efficient way, come up with ways to increase sales, and give solutions to the problems that your customers come across with.
Nowadays, those three departments can already be handled by one software- and here are the things that you need to know about it:
What is a CRM Software?
CRM software is a tool that helps your sales team make more sales by automatically capturing the data you have about your prospects and customers. If you dig a little deeper, CRM tools can help all areas of your company as they can integrate your sales data with other important information such as marketing and customer service data. Along with that, CRM applications can make your business run more efficiently and thus increase your revenue flow.
CRM can be thought of as a digital address book with some upgrades. It contains all customer contact information, along with a demographic profile based on their social media accounts and other sources of data. More advanced software also has a history of all the interactions between your sales representatives and the customers.
The fact that CRM can store all this data about your individual customers and your entire customer base makes it a powerful tool that enables you to spot marketing and sales trends when combined with analytics. Using it can determine which products appeal to which customers based on their previous purchases and overall profile.
Another outstanding feature of most CRM software is the fact that it can help you automate significant parts of your sales process. It can automate activities such as scheduling sales meetings and follow-up contact, and sending out prospective messages. If you have an entire sales team, you can use CRM to assign tasks to individual representatives. That way, the sales manager will know exactly what each rep is doing, how each rep’s performance is, and who is available to work on new prospects.
Consider this: CRM can help not only your sales department but other departments of your business. The most modern CRM tools are able to integrate data from your sales team with data from your customer service department, accounting, marketing, and others. CRM solutions can also help optimize your marketing strategy and inventory management by giving you the knowledge of which your most demanded products are.
Overall, it can be said that CRM solutions benefit not only your sales team but your entire business.
The Most Popular CRM Solutions Right Now
Currently, the CRM market is led by five major software development companies:
Oracle
Microsoft
Adobe
SAP
Salesforce
Out of all of those, only Salesforce specializes in CRM. That’s why it’s best suited for smaller businesses, as it integrates sales, marketing, AI-powered analytics, and contact management. On the other hand, SAP Digital for Customer Engagement is better-suited for enterprises. It is designed to be integrated with a resource planning software usually used at larger firms. Microsoft’s Dynamics solution is made to be combined with Office 365, which makes it an excellent fit for all companies that use that software solution. In contrast, Adobe Marketing Cloud is a marketing solution that only features some CRM capabilities as a part of a broader package.
All in all, each of these CRM solutions can be used for your company. Which one you decide to go for depends on the way your business operates and what its needs are. In most cases, smaller ventures need a more “all in one” CRM tool that is able to provide all the necessary features in a compact package.
What Features to Look For in a Small Business CRM Software?
CRM should be more than just a tool to store your contacts in. Most modern solutions offer a ton of other features that will help you boost your revenue, get more sales and do more effective marketing campaigns.
Let’s discuss everything that you need your CRM tool to do in order to be effective for your small business. Here are some of the standout features:
Lead Management and Sales
You can easily find customers if you automatically generate leads from other sources such as social media, your website, newsletter sign-ups, and inbound calls. A good CRM solution can do that for you. Additionally, CRM can guide prospects all the way across the entire sales pipeline, from lead generation to making the final sale.
Marketing
Any valuable CRM tool has some built-in marketing features. Most often, they include email templates, SMS messaging, and even e-mail marketing pipelines. More advanced solutions even offer forecasts for potential sales and competition tracking.
E-commerce
There are some CRM tools that have built-in e-commerce functionality. However, most simply offer easy e-commerce integration. Regardless of what the platform you choose offers, it’s essential to consider this functionality if you own an online store.
Reporting Functionality
Almost all CRM solutions have a built-in reporting functionality, and some more modern software even supports real-time, live dashboards. It’s vital that you check if your software choice has all of the importing and exporting features that you will need in order for your business to run smoothly.
Call Center Capabilities
If you choose to pick a cheaper option, it’s likely that you won’t have call center capabilities available. In those cases, you can opt to get a third-party application integrated with your CRM software.
However, if having a call center option is vital for your company, it’s better to get a more expensive CRM solution that already has it.
Approval Workflows
If you have a small business, managing big and small projects will be a massive part of it. That’s why it’s good to have built-in workflows that help you and your team deal with task management. It’s important to note that if you need more specific workflows or you need to have additional steps to the approval process, you have to make sure the CRM software you choose has those available.
3 Tips To Follow When Choosing CRM Software
The biggest mistake most businesses make when choosing a CRM tool is focusing on the best vendors and functionalities instead of thinking about what the company needs.
Before you begin looking for a CRM solution, it’s a good idea to find the answers to the following questions:
What processes in our company are in need of improvement, and how can a CRM system help?
What workflows do we lack and need to add in?
How many people in the company will use the tool if we have it?
Do we have any software that needs to be integrated with the new CRM tool?
How much money can we spend on CRM?
After you go through all of these and have an idea why you need a CRM solution, you can start following the below tips so that the one you choose is the best one possible.
Request a Free Trial or a Test Drive
As a business owner, you should never fully believe the marketing tactics of a company. It’s always a good idea to test out a CRM solution before buying into it.
The best thing you can do is start with a demonstration and then ask for a free trial period. Usually, during the live demo session, a sales rep will walk you through the software and show you how you can use it. Then, if you have questions in regards to the tool, you can ask.
If you like the tool, you can then ask for a free trial that will let you see how the entire software works and the pros and cons of using it. Don’t forget to test out key features, ease of use, and its ability to be integrated with other applications.
If you want to read more about CRM, visit this link: https://camberlion.com/small-business-crm/?utm_source=steemit&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=Camberlion+Blog&utm_id=steemit&utm_content=SMA