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Running a small business is no easy feat! You need to constantly make adjustments to the dynamic business environment, growing customer needs, and changing market scenarios with limited resources and budgets.
Essential business tools can be a big lifesaver for you! One such tool is Customer Relationship Management, or simply CRM.
CRM is a handy tool that helps you improve your sales, service quality, and customer interactions. Whether you generate and track new leads and opportunities, want to fix your sales process, or wish to retain existing customers, the CRM tool can help you optimize all these processes. Hence, all businesses, especially small businesses, need a CRM to grow their customer base and revenue.
How can you benefit from a CRM, as a small business?
- CRM helps to channel your sales funnel
- Marketing and sales teams get a 360-degree view of customers and visibility into sales opportunities.
- Get visibility by tracking each part of your sales process with a visual deal pipeline and dashboards, thus enabling you to forecast better.
- Qualify leads for better sales conversions, which leads to increased revenue.
- Adapt a process quickly for connecting with customers without wasting much time.
- Provide your team with task automation opportunities such as entering data and sending a greeting or introductory emails by using the CRM tool
What to look for when selecting CRM software?
Custom Configuration: Being a small business, you are trying new things rather than following a guidebook. You must look for customization or configuration options to modify the CRM tool according to your business needs.
Budget-Friendly: Small businesses seeking CRM tools usually look for the most cost-efficient option; however, if your budget is low and you want to know the usefulness of the CRM tool, it is better to try a free CRM. There are many budget-friendly CRM tools available in the market.
After-sales support: You may or may not have a dedicated IT department as a small business. So, ensure that the CRM you choose has an excellent customer support team for quickly solving technical issues.
Choosing the right CRM for your business:
Choosing the right CRM system can be difficult as a decision-maker. With so many CRM options, each with a different set of tools and features, identifying the right one for your small business is quite challenging. Hence here are a few tips that will guide you:
Specifications of features: To start, be clear about what you need the CRM system to do for you, as there are many different CRM software with many features to choose from. Once you know your goal, you know which CRM will work best for your business.
Business Growth and Scalability: Choose a CRM that can scale as your business grows. It should be flexible enough to your changing business needs as your organization grows and evolves rapidly.
User Access & Roles: Choosing the right CRM system allows marketing and sales teams to work on one unified platform. The more users you include, the better it is, as all of them will have a unified view of what is happening in the sales department. Make sure the CRM you choose has defined roles and permissions.
Customer Support or After Sales Service: Customer service differentiates a good CRM from an average one. As a small business owner, time and resources are premium commodities. A small business should look for a CRM tool that provides good customer support and multichannel communication.
Integration with marketing: Marketing is the heart and soul of any business. A good CRM tool/software should offer a perspective view of each lead, previous customers, and current customers. This can include their related data like demographics, contacts, value, margins, and products purchased. Such data can provide well-structured marketing campaigns and allows you to build landing pages, email marketing, score and qualify leads, and run multichannel marketing campaigns.
Conclusion:
Choosing the right CRM for your small and medium business can improve your team’s productivity and help accelerate sales.
Why IGT Solutions?
IGT Solutions provides omnichannel CRM solutions for customers of different industry verticals. We help you achieve exponential results and excellence in transforming your CRM system by ensuring all interactions and touchpoints are focused and delivered in your chosen business industry.
Author:
Himanshu G
andhi is a Project Manager at IGT Solution’s Robotic Process Automation (RPA). He has 14 years of diverse work experience as a Senior Consultant and Project Manager for Digital Transformation across Airlines, Food and Beverage, and Banking industry. He can be reached at Himanshu.gandhi@igtsolutions.azurewebsites.net.