Whether you are planning to start a small business or few years into operation, small businesses face several challenges at some point of time.
Challenges may include hiring the right resources, creating your brand name through right marketing strategies, reaching out to the right target audience for your products/services, understanding buyer persona and the biggest challenge is to maintain the database of your existing customers and the list goes on!
Do these problems overwhelm you? Keep you worried all the time?
Despite these challenges there are ways which can help small businesses to integrate and combine sales, marketing as well as operations.
One of the potential platforms to combat the challenges is a CRM. It has proven to decrease the cost of running a business significantly. Do not believe me? Take a look at the stats!
According to a research carried out by Salesforce, companies which use a cloud-based CRM have improved their sales by 29%
Let’s see how a CRM can help you combat your daily challenges:
Do you manage all your company’s management tasks manually?
Do you record all your business conversations in emails?
Do you use spreadsheets to record your client data?
But what if you could do all these tasks in a single platform i.e. a system where you can organize all the information? Won’t it be easier for you to stay organized with all your data and pull them as and when required.
This would not only make your valuable data accessible but also increases the visibility. As a result, data analysis becomes easier.
A CRM lets you learn several things as well as intricate details about your business which you never had an idea before!
And when you have a better understanding of your business you grow!
Maintaining healthy and long-lasting relation with customers is every business owner’s priority. But for small business owners this is vital. Because building trust and strong clientele would not only create continuous sales opportunities but also would enable your business to grow.
A CRM would help you achieve this goal.
How?
By providing the needed visibility into your customer base. CRM helps small business owners to think and work on different strategies that are required to formulate better plans. Such a system breaks new ground for unceasing profitability.
Do not take my words only! You can see the stats instead because numbers never lie..
According to a report published by Cappterra, the rates of customer retention and satisfaction have increased by 47% after using a CRM.
As a small business owner, you probably have to juggle among different tasks and job responsibilities.
Hence, are you aware which of your customers are waiting a call back from you?
Do you have a clear idea which of your prospects are showing interest in the products and services that you offer?
Do you know which of your customers are currently on hold?
Knowing all these would help you run your business much more efficiently and seamlessly.
Hence, a CRM gives you the status visibility of your customers. A CRM keeps track of all your business whereabouts- when to make a call, get in touch with the prospects, follow up a customer etc. And all the related information can be easily updated into the CRM. Such a way of mapping end to end customer journey enables you to maintain a long lasting relationship, and helps you avoid following up on junk and cold leads, so that you can devote your time into maturing the hot leads.
One of the major limitations of small businesses is funds. Running business successfully with limited funds is a challenging job. Hence, every penny needs to be spent wisely and judiciously because there is no room for wastage.
So how would you allocate your funds into the right business areas that would yield maximum profits for you?
By spending money into those marketing channels which bring you more qualified leads.
By marketing your products to the right audience.
But how would you possibly know which marketing channels are suitable and profitable for you?
A CRM lets you see all these stats on your marketing channels so that you can allocate funds to the profitable ones.
Similarly, you would never want to lose your income by focusing on the wrong prospects. For a small business to take off, revenues are very important.
Here, CRM can provide extremely valuable insights on future trends of sales and help you adjust your current sales strategies which in turn, would drive higher revenues. Stats again prove this claim as well. A study conducted by IBM shows using a CRM the conversion rates can rise up to 300%! Unbelievable right? But facts never bluff.
Another major struggle that small businesses face is: “where to store the business-related data and customer data?” Is your laptop a safe place to keep the invaluable data?
But what will happen to your data if your laptop gets damaged or stolen? How can you possibly retrieve all your data?
Well, you must be thinking there are other portable ways of storing data.
Like notepads, memo-books, calendars, emails and other traditional ways.
In any small business there is always resource crunch, but due to this, are traditional means of storing data good enough for your business in the long run?
Clearly not!
A cloud-based CRM guarantees data safety and releases you from the constant fear of what will happen if the data is lost or corrupted.
Small business owners do not always have enough manpower, and this is a major issue. Due to limited manpower, a single person has to carry out several job responsibilities. Hence, this leaves room for errors.
Let us get into the details of this problem by answering the following questions:
Do you or your teammates remember how many leads were converted to customers in the past weeks or months?
Would you be able to produce a quick data of your conversion rate if asked to do so?
Do you know which methods helped your teammates to reach out to customers?
You can figure these stats out with the help of excel formulas in spreadsheets. But this method is error prone and chances of making mistakes in calculating the results are high.
But a CRM can produce instant metrics on different aspects of your business and generates reports according to your specific needs.
As we can see a CRM is invaluable for small businesses- it is a go-to solution.
In short, a CRM can be immense helpful for you in running your small business:
It can help you in your business expansion.
It can help you in optimization of your teammates work.
It can enhance the growth of your sales team.
Since small business major weakness is lack of manpower, a CRM can automate several areas of your business processes.
Hence, introducing a CRM into your business won’t be detrimental for your business’s health. Instead, this is a major step towards massive success!
For a successful tomorrow contact our CRM implementation experts today!