Business owners handle several tasks and make different decisions pertaining to their company. As a result, it’s easy to get engrossed in some things and sideline others. The pressure of running a new business can cause you to miss out on the latest technology development. Regardless of your business type and size, customers and prospects are among your business's valuable assets.
A startup business has a smaller customer base and data size than an established company. As a result, small business owners tend to manage them manually. Investing in a simple and affordable Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system can be helpful because the business can expand at a great level. It helps to understand what a CRM is.
The following are nine reasons your business needs a simple and affordable CRM system.
1. Organizes Your Business
It’s important to manage customer relationships, capture new customers and retain existing ones. A small business can start with an affordable CRM tool to manage customer details and later scale up to cloud-based CRM software. It's possible to get the easiest CRM to use with mind-blowing benefits due to technological advances and the internet.
A simple CRM for sales can help your small businesses solve certain issues, including:
- The use of separate folders and spreadsheets to manage existing customers’ details, payment history, inquiries, and prospects.
- The fall off of prospective customers because of the lack of timely follow-up due to the shortage of workforce.
- Misdirected records due to stiff budgets.
The good news is that there is a simple and affordable method they can use to grow their business. Simple CRM solutions in the market handle sales and marketing activities in a single platform. The tool notifies you when there is something that needs urgent attention regarding a prospect or existing customer.
2. Automates Your Marketing Efforts
You might be surprised how simple CRM software for small businesses has endless advantages. Many growing businesses have designed cost-efficient marketing programs with the help of these platforms.
The tools help you identify your customers’ needs and develop cost-efficient marketing programs to address them. They also enable you to place your customers in various categories to identify those with high returns.
3. Improves Internal Communication
Communication is the backbone of every business’s success. Better communication between your teams and customers is likely to increase your sales and revenues.
A simple CRM system enables employees to share data or collaborate between multiple departments and keep everyone in the loop. You can also load your CRM app with different integrations. This increases communication channels and reduces the response time. They can contact you via website chat, email, and social media.
4. Increases Efficiency and Profitability
In business, sales are important, whether big or small. A company cannot survive without making profits from the sale of its products. The profits increase when your business makes more sales.
Based on Statista, CRM businesses’ revenue went up from just below $14 billion in 2010, to almost $69 billion in 2020. This indicates a rise of about $55 billion, or a percentage rise of an incredible 393%.
A simple CRM tool can enhance efficiency and marketing efforts to support your business's growth. It can enrich the collection of data and its analysis, and provide your sales and marketing teams with helpful insights.
Further, CRM software gives your employees access to important information to help them address critical business and customer needs. They can find the necessary data conveniently, and anytime they need it. The employees can use the information in the following situations:
- Respond to customer complaints regarding poor service or defective products.
- Send engagement emails to customers about your latest update.
- Reduce training costs with user-friendly CRM tools.
5. Generates Better Analytical Reports
The best simple CRM software offers advanced features and functionalities besides managing sales, marketing, and leads. You can generate automatic reports using the data you’ve collected and saved on the cloud-based CRM software.
Additionally, the tool lets you customize the views of your dashboard according to your needs. You can use the performance reports and regular updates to make tactical decisions regarding your customers or overall business.
6. Expand Your Business
Every entrepreneur or business wants to manage a growing business. However, it can be tricky to expand a business without tracking the sales activities. Monitoring the sales process enables you to identify potential opportunities that can help you generate more revenue.
More so, you can streamline the sales process with the help of simple CRM software for small businesses. After all, your company is at the initial growth stages, and a tool with basic features can help you establish the best marketing strategies and lead generation.
Indeed, you don’t need to hire more salespeople when there is a sudden influx of customers. A simple sales CRM can automate the sales process, allowing your salespeople to handle incoming leads.
7. Increases Accessibility
The global health crisis affected small businesses adversely. During that time, customers’ demands reduced significantly while employees were forced to work from home. Managing customer contacts, inquiries, and payment details was challenging without a system.
But then, smart business owners adopted simple CRM while others opted for the cloud-based options. Thus, these systems enabled their sales team to access data and conversations during the pandemic. Your business, too, can remain connected with its customers under any condition as long as the sales team has a laptop, tablet, or smartphone connected to the internet.
8. Forecasts Your Business
A simple sales CRM can give your sales and marketing teams a forecasted view of the business. These reports can help you make data-based decisions in the future.
Small businesses use CRM applications to set both short-term and long-term goals. They generate reports to help them in their business growth and expansion.
9. Enhances Customer Satisfaction
Happy customers return and tell others about their seamless customer experience. Businesses strive to enhance customer satisfaction in order to attract new customers and get more referrals.
Small businesses use simple CRM applications to track customers’ complaints and interests. The information helps them provide quick responses and personalized services, hence boosting brand loyalty.
Wrapping Up
Simple CRM applications help small business owners to focus on growing their customer base, sales, and revenue with minimal effort. The tools automate customer services and sales activities, making it easy to access data analytics and reports.
The 9 benefits of using simple and affordable CRMs mentioned above shows how the application can help you during a crisis. Smart entrepreneurs that adopted CRM systems during the Covid pandemic were able to provide their customers a seamless customer service. Undoubtedly, your business, too, will benefit from using CRM software.
