CRM
9 June 2021
A small business-oriented customer relationship management (CRM) system helps you achieve all of this. By storing and managing customer and prospect information on one platform, everyone in your business is connected with minimal IT involvement, freeing up your team to focus on customers, both new and existing.
As a small business owner, you know that customer relationships are crucial to success. But do you actually need a CRM (customer relationship management) system?
If you’re questioning whether it’s a worthwhile investment, then ask yourself if you want your business to expand and run more smoothly. If the answer is yes, then read on to find out how a CRM system can help you achieve this.
When new business leads come in, your CRM system will sort and prioritise them. This will enable your sales team to respond to them quickly and efficiently and removes the risk of any getting missed.
As your business grows, the spreadsheets, emails, and post it notes that served you so well when you started out, won’t be adequate anymore. Not only will these old school tools limit your team’s visibility of customer interactions, they’ll hinder your ability to make informed decisions quickly.
By contrast, a CRM system provides a single, central source of data. Being able to access this data quickly and easily will help your team when making new sales, upselling and retaining customers.
It can be hard monitoring how your sales teams are performing, especially if they’re working from home or out on the road.
With a CRM system, your sales team can update records and provide information from their mobile devices, so that it’s instantly available for you to access.
As well as helping you track in real time what’s going on with your business, you can identify where extra resources need to be allocated and accurately forecast future sales.
Retaining your hard-won customers is essential to the survival of your business. This is achieved by not only providing them with your products, but by providing an excellent service.
If your customer service team spends more time reacting to customer complaints than proactively anticipating customer needs, a CRM system can help readdress this imbalance.
Having a unified view of your customer and effectively managing case flow gives your team the tools they need to provide an excellent service, which creates loyalty.
Your sales staff are employed to make sales, so you don’t want them to have to waste time manually entering data to produce reports.
Because CRM systems keep all your data in one easy-to-access place, updating records takes very little time, leaving your staff free to do what you pay them to do – sell.
Some solutions automatically feed account and contact information into your CRM. They can even check your customer data and fill in any missing information that may have been left out and remove duplicated records.
The right CRM system will help you find customers, win business, create customer loyalty and give your staff a straightforward, easily accessible way of working.
Many successful CRM rollouts are combinations of short- and long-term implementations. Combine immediate goals – getting the tech up and running and hitting adoption targets –with a longer-term understanding that your CRM will evolve over time as your business grows.
Acknowledging up front that CRM is a long-term investment in your business makes it all the more likely that you’ll see returns on that investment later on.
As proud Salesforce partners, Cognition can help you on your CRM journey. Whether you are evaluating Salesforce or are an experienced team in need of additional support, we can either augment your existing team or fully manage the project.
