What is CRM?

Everything starts with the customer – June Martin

You read it right. Everything starts with a customer. Customers play a significant role in any business.

Developing a relationship with the customer, prospective or current, is one of the most important needs of a business. A great customer relationship is developed when the organization stays connected with its customer, from stage of prospect till the end.

You need a knife for cutting vegetables. Imagine yourself if you have to cut vegetables without using a knife and with just hands. Similarly, all the tasks in a business needs tool. Without tool, it will be messy and customer relations and sales is not an exception.

If knife is to cutting vegetables, CRM is to managing leads and improving sales.

What is CRM, by the way?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a software that helps businesses in improving their relationship with prospective customers and existing customers. It helps in tracking leads, following up, managing sales, and taking care of customer support, – all in one place.

CRM or Customer Relationship Management tool is all-in-one solution for gathering customer data in one place.

Managing customer data in central place helps businesses improve customer experience and customer satisfaction. With a CRM in place, it is easy to track all customer interactions resulting in better relationships and better sales.

Why CRM is important for your business?

CRM plays a vital role in improving the business relationship between a business and its customers. For any business, staying on top of customer data and doing regular follow-ups are necessary to retain and to gain new customers. With manual records and sticky notes, closing business deals is messy and difficult. To win a customer, a streamlined process is essential.

In the digital era, if you are running a business or managing a sales team, you may already have instant access to mobile phones and apps for managing business data. With the internet evolution and cloud infrastructure, 80% of the businesses today works digitally and uses multiple digital tools.

CRM is one such tool specifically designed to improve sales. It helps businesses to focus on individual customer relationships, streamline processing and improve top line and profitability. It lets you manage all activities without losing track of potential customers and their needs.

CRM is one such tool specifically designed to improve sales. It helps businesses to focus on individual customer relationships, streamline processing and improve top line and profitability. It lets you manage all activities without losing track of potential customers and their needs.

Do small business need a CRM?

If you are a small business owner, you would have realized a small business environment is dynamic, ever-changing and challenging. 

Understanding the needs of customers and improving sales is crucial for your small business not only to grow but even sustain where you are now.

If you just started-up, launched your first product or busy on boarding your first customer, probably you will not need a CRM right away. In the very early stages of your ‘small business’ journey you would not have large amount of customer data and hence you can do with other methods to manage them say using spread sheets, phone contacts and so on.

However, when you have crossed the first goal of having sizable number of initial wins, and ready to welcome many more customers, it is the perfect time for your small business to embrace a CRM.

Scaling up sales needs lot of enthusiasm, energy and efforts. It needs good tools as well. Having a good CRM which suits your business needs can be a boon and can free up time for you to continue focus on customers and sales.

During early stages of growth and traction, time is the most valuable resource that you can gift yourself. Any investment in tools and process that saves time will definitely contribute to your bottom line. A CRM at this stage will definitely help you to grow your revenue.

To make your business sustain and successful, you need to know customers interests and their preferences. CRM can help you to record such interests and their preferences and share internally within the organization.

What are different types of CRM?

Mostly, CRMs fall into one of these three broad categories.

Operational – Operational CRMs are an important tool for lead generation and lead management. They automate the process involved in lead generation, lead tracking and sales conversions. Sales team management i.e. assigning leads for follow up can be a central part of operational CRMs. Operational CRMs are used both in sales and customer support.

Analytical – Analytical CRMs are primarily used to analyse customer data. These are databases with detailed information about customers and processes. Their main function is to analyse data and to provide relevant information to the user. They help to understand more about customers wants and needs. Moreover, it helps to improve customer satisfaction.

Collaborative – Collaborative CRMs help in breaking barriers and finding new ways to improve sales in business strategies. By sharing customer information with your sales team, other departments, businesses are able to create better experience for their customers.

What benefits do I get by using a CRM?

CRM supports sales, marketing and many other areas by organizing individual customer data. This improves understanding of each customer and priorities whom to track and to close deals faster. CRM brings many benefits and some of them are listed below.

• All customer data in once place
• Access to customer information anytime and anywhere
• Managing your leads more efficiently
• Build strong relationships through effective customer interaction
• Simplifies sales and marketing process
• Streamlining your sales process
• Detailed report on sales
• Increases revenue
• More transparency
• Retain more customers
• Enhance customer service

Grow your business with CRM

All of your customers are partners in your mission – Shep Hyken

For any business, customers are stepping stones to success. Building a long-term relationship with the customer is hard but not impossible. Choosing best CRM for your small business is the first step towards growing with your CRM.

You need to keep delivering great products and provide world class service repeatedly to win and get customer satisfaction.

CRM solutions help maximize value and trust.