How CRM can help Small Businesses?

CRM is the most widely used software solution that is cost effective plus hassle free to use. The solution is not only used for sales & customer management but also for performing day to day business operations.

For small businesses, the CRM solution for Sales can double their sales at a faster pace. From lead generation, to placing an order or even the follow up of the same, CRM is the apt solution in efficiently managing your small business day to day operations and improve the efficiency.

However, ‘why does one require a CRM software?’ is what crosses over the minds of many small business owners. Below are some of the insights that can give a better clarity on how small businesses can make use of by adapting to the CRM technology and what you can expect when implementing a CRM for small business.

  1. Integrates the sales, marketing & customer data in one centralized place for easy customer management and retrieval.
  2. Provides fast access to vital data of customer from anywhere at anytime.
  3. Integrates your existing business process without hassle.
  4. Seamless usabilty with defined access control for better management.
  5. Customizable & configure to suit your business requirement and process.
  6.  Reduces Maintenance costs and increases business efficiency.

Why Cloud Based CRM suits Small Business?

It doesn’t matter if your company holds 100s of employees or just a handful. Today, CRM is the buzzword that is going to help you to establish closer connections with customers, provide professional customer service, sell more and grow your business further.

While big businesses more or less spend of different software solutions as needed, small businesses normally are more concerned on what they invest in.

Defintely small businesses have a clear straight forward requirement when choosing a software. It has to be affordable, should not be complicated to use, has to be easy in terms of deployment & maintenance and has to accessible at any time. This is because small businesses typically does not own its own server, hardware or IT personnel, and also will not be able to invest hugely at the initial stage. However, they would need the software to be tailored to their specific business process to avoid complexity in usage and also their team may be working round the clock and not just stick to a typical 9 to 5 time.

So small business owners need to consider a reliable CRM software that can satisfy them on the above needs and requirements.

Adopting to the new technology

Gone are the days when CRM software used to be expensive and complicated. Today’s CRM systems are not only more technologically advanced but also user friendly which comes with a variety of solutions and features that can address different types of businesses and industries.

Things have changed. Now everything is on CLOUD!

Things have definitely changed over the period of time and many small business owners opt for Cloud solutions to grow their business.

  1. Hassle Free Installation: The long and complex installation process is no more around. You can be ‘IT worry free’ and be up and runnding in no time with cloud based solutions. All you would need is an internet connection and you will be able to login and start using.
  2. Seamless Access: Round-the-clock accessibility is the most important benefit of cloud CRM. Cloud CRM gives you the access at anytime from anywhere – be it laptop, desktop, mobile or a tablet. All you need is just the internet connection.
  3. Ease of Use: With just the monthly fixed pricing, you can use the CRM as per your convenience. The system maintenance and the upgrades are maintained by your CRM vendors.
  4. Cost effective Solution: Investing on a Cloud CRM is never going to be a costly affair. There is no huge investments that can dig up a hole in your pockets. You can keep paying regular & smaller installment based monthly charges which is one of the reasons why Cloud CRM solution is optimal for small enterprises.
  5. Flexible Potential: How easy is it to own a product that can be tailored as per your business needs? You can anytime upgrade or downgrade based what features are required currently.

Do you want to find out how cloud based CRM can impact your business? Then try out a 7 day FREE Trial here: 

free crm trial

 

Scope of CRM Software for Small Business

With the growth of plenty of businesses in India, most business and organization owners are looking forward for different strategies for success in their organizations. More and more businesses are increasingly realizing the importance of customers for their businesses and therefore trying to find out the right way of managing a good relationship with customers.

CRM, when implemented into a business process can smoothly help in handling information and data related to customers by means of which the needs and feedbacks of the customers can be easily tracked and monitored. It can also help the business in maintaining a smooth relationship with the customers, while at the same time the customers can also be satisfied.

Customers are important for any business, and therefore every organization should make use of the best strategy in order to maintain a long lasting relationship with the customers. With the help of CRM Solutions, it becomes easier for a business to track information about the existing customers as well as new clients.

CRM is a great way through which customer capacity of a business can be enhanced to generate maximum sales and profit. As a result, the growth opportunities of the business, as a whole can also be enhanced.

CRM Software Solution helps a growing small business to gain the maximum benefit from their customer data as well as effectively integrate sales, marketing and customer service data into one secure easily accessible database. This helps to streamline business processes and enables the users to successfully manage all aspects of customer interaction, from customer acquisition to sales to post-sales customer service and retain long term customer satisfaction and relationship.

 

Cloud computing for Small Business

A cloud based CRM for small business owners is something that can offer number of benefits. The software can help you share information, delegate tasks and gather information about various customers and projects.

Turn on ‘Sales’ with speed

Maple CRM solution provides the right tools and capabilities for sales executives to make the most of every interaction with the customers. From planning to rich reporting features, sales rep can spend more time effectively on turning leads to business.

Building customer relationship

Being a cloud based solution, Maple CRM enables real time access to each information helping you to manage customer relationships every step of the way. Because it’s in the cloud, all customers get the benefit of the same high reliability and performance without the upfront investment. So even the smallest of companies can finally afford a great product.

CRM enables small businesses to optimize relationships throughout the product life cycle. To quickly add users as they grow, to enhance customer interactions and to eliminate the burden on IT.

The key benefits of using Maple CRM solution are increased sales and lower costs for marketing, sales support, and customer service.

Maple CRM also offers SMS integration, Website integration etc helping your business to be equipped with range of business operation tools to perform business functions as needed.

 

CRM – the need to build relationships

Excellent customer service is about being aware of customer needs and responding to them effectively. CRM helps you to understand, analyse and respond to your customers needs in a consistent way, right across your business.

Practising CRM requires an efficient and integrated internal business system. Many businesses benefit from the organisational discipline CRM imposes, as well as from the technology itself.

So the software enables a business to build a better personal relationship with their customers.

As a business, you should remember that Customer Relationship Management is a business philosophy. Understanding your customers needs enables you to build better relationships and increase sales.

A well-implemented system will increase the number of customers for a company, increase the satisfaction of those customers, and grow revenue and profit in both absolute and per-customer measures.

CRM helps you to not only get new customers, but also to stay close to existing customers. A solid customer relations strategy is a must, and it can be effectively built, supported and maintained by technology.

Read further : Potential of Small Business CRM

 

Why Small Businesses adopt Cloud CRM?

CRM application tends more to profit small industries than large ones. CRM is a strategy that works towards increasing the relationship that the customer has with the organization. CRM enables sales staff to deal better with their customers through the better management of the sales process and ultimately helps them to close sales deals faster. It manages to simplify the marketing and sales processes in an organization.

Key Benefits of CRM to various industries:

  • Increase in call center efficiency
  • Easy marketing campaigns
  • Overall revenue increases
  • Cost reduction is achieved
  • Better customer service
  • Businesses can gain the competitive edge
  • More focus on production
  • Teamwork with the organization
  • Access to vital customer data
  • Receive satisfied customers
  • Easy handling of routine tasks
  • Support & marketing expenses are reduced
  • Sales teams can be effectively monitored
  • Easy & controlled access to employees
  • Sales forecasting can be achieved
  • New opportunities can be discovered
  • Aware of Customer needs
  • Better integrated internal system
  • Organization discipline is achieved
  • Access to customer history and preferences
  • Regular performance monitoring

Why Cloud CRM is best suited for Small Businesses?

Better customer service levels, globalization, higher profitability, competition is the answer. The requirements of a Small Business on CRM software solution is easy installment, less technical resources, ease of integration, reliability and scalability. Cloud CRM fulfils these needs with cost reduction methods.

Cloud based CRM application is a high-end tool which helps in organizing business processes that holds effective business interactions offering user friendly solution in performance, cost cuts, and flexible services meeting the customer’s satisfaction.

 

Potential of Small Business CRM

There is no doubt that the growing ubiquity of cloud based technology, which brings down the price of even SaaS-based CRM, is a big part of the reason that CRM technology is finally on the rise with small business. It’s now affordable with technology choices ranging from free to very little costing.

What makes CRM even more attractive to small business is the so-called cost effective model. Even businesses having one or two people use CRM software. There are such CRM software products that are aimed mainly for small sized segment. All markets with customers have potential for CRM. Even though small business owners have been slow to incorporate it, once they do they really, really do make complete use of it.

CRM focuses on opportunities and strategies for supporting small businesses. Many companies have designed CRM software to fulfill the needs of the small business community. Enterprise community always find ERP and a full fledged complex CRM solutions which is much desired for their type of business operations. It’s not the same for small businesses as the process and work flow operations are fairly simple and CRM solutions can easily fit to the need and even customize it as per the business requirement without consuming much time.

An ongoing challenge that businesses face is improving customer satisfaction. Many companies use CRM Software to help impact their customer retention levels. Sharing the customer service strategy through a CRM software application is ideal.

CRM is not just a technology, it is much more than that. It is a capability to perform business operations and improve profits.

 

Finding business success with CRM Software

CRM standing for Customer Relationship Management is a system of business that not only helps to track and measure the sales activities but also improves the efficiency of the business executives in providing service to customers.

CRM system does not provide fruitful results immediate to its implementation. The CRM needs to seen as a long term investment that offers benefits and helps businesses to make the effective use of the resources.

CRM applications offers advantages in number of ways. Few as mentioned below:

Management of lead generation efficiently.

With the help of lead generation, you may find many leads into your lead pool that needs to sorted, qualified, managed, tracked and worked on. The leads that are generated would include the prospective buyers and also those leads who would only eat up your time and will never turn out to be a customer. CRM systems can help the marketing and sales executives to reach the productive opportunities.

Identification of in depth information of the leads and customers.

CRM system has the power to store each and every information of the customer which can be retrieved later as and when required. From searching the smallest information to finding the history of the lead, executives can get it instantly without loosing much of the time. Managers and the business owners can easily generate reports to analyse the business productivity so that further decisions can be made to improve or change the process.

Builds relationship more than transactions.

Understanding and analyzing the requirement of the customer and further offering more benefits to his requirement will make customer happy rather than you offering something which is of no interest to him. CRM applications also help in conducting customer loyalty program or customer surveys. Today’s savvy customers prefer to do business with companies that exceed their expectations with much interaction. Implementing positive experiences and resolving problems at the earliest time help companies in retaining the existing customers which may also increase referrals.

So if you think this is the right time to invest on a CRM system for your business, then do have a look at Maple CRM Software.

Sign up for a free trial today and get to know what Maple CRM software has to offer you for increasing your business profits.

 

SMS configuration with CRM

CRM can be configured with SMS integration to work with inbound SMS responses from customer or sales agents.

Maple CRM provides flexible SMS integration solutions and ensures that SMS communications can effortlessly keep running and it can provide continuous and consistent SMS delivery.

SMS marketing is considered to be one of the few marketing techniques that is used to reach the targeted customers at anytime and anywhere.

Consider a sample SMS configuration to know how it could help in a typical business flow. Company A is into telemarketing where it deals with generating leads and scheduling meetings for the sales executives.

With a well placed CRM, you have the records of all your contacts, leads and customers. You can easily monitor whats happening with a lead, which sales agent is working on it and how interested the customer is in your product/service.

But many a times it so happens that the meeting which is scheduled with the Sales Agent often gets postponed or cancelled and it goes uninformed to the sales agents resulting in loss of time and confusion.

So what if you have a system that could confirm both customer and sales agents time schedule and cancel if none responds. So if they receive SMS notification regarding the meeting and if they respond back to the SMS, then only the meeting time is confirmed. This process could happen few hours before the actual time scheduled. This can avoid Sales Agents to travel till the client’s place unnecessarily. This also saves up the time of your sales agent.

Such SMS integration can happen with SMS templates which could be even more easier when things are all automated and responses are sent automatically based on the time duration.

Read more on CRM with SMS integration.

 

CRM with SMS integration

Being able to communicate through SMS keeps your customers or employees informed in real time and dramatically reduces the cost and time associated with the process tasks maintaining a positive customer experience with your business.

SMS based solutions can improve the profitability with simple short SMS as it includes integrated SMS campaigns, automated SMS response and reduces the need for basic outbound calls. It can also help in automating followup and manage new sales opportunities.

Maple CRM can be easily integrated with other systems to automate the SMS based workflow of organization infrastructure and reduces the communication overheads. SMS integration includes sending & receiving of information through SMS and processing the same for further communication. Maple ensures that SMS communications can effortlessly keep running and it can provide continuous and consistent SMS delivery.

How outgoing SMS can work out for business scenarios?

  • Sending SMS to potential customers
  • Sending out SMS alert or reminders for an appointment or event
  • Sending out SMS to sales agents who are on the field to call the customer

How incoming SMS can work out for various business scenarios?

  • Field engineers/technican to receive sales or customer support cases when they are on the move.
  • Voting/Polling/Surveys/Contest
  • Registration for events, service or programs.

Other key Features of Maple CRM with SMS Integration:

  • SMS templates
  • Bulk SMS
  • Personalized SMS to targeted customer
  • Send thank you SMS, SMS for greetings or wishes to customers
  • Order status update to customer through SMS.
  • Advertisements or promotions through SMS
  • SMS reminders to customers on payment/renewal/next service date etc
  • Facilitate people to subscribe to your updates via SMS.
  • SMS campaigns
  • Two-way SMS

Check out few of the sample SMS configurations from Maple CRM

 

Web Based Small Business CRM Software

Large businesses have different goals and plans where as small organization have different goals and different plans. Small Business CRMs are quite helpful in increasing revenues, it smoothens the sales cycle, improves lead conversion rates, provides better customer retention and brings in improved profits etc.

But before implementing such a CRM software for business the entrepreneurs should ask themselves a few questions justifying the need and requirement of a small business CRM like – Why CRM? – Do you even need a CRM solution? and How to choose best CRM? etc.

Small business CRM software are available online thus improving your overall working model as well as it is cost effective. The Web based CRM for small business can be implemented much faster than traditional on-premise CRM systems. Business persons just need to subscribe for required features and pay the minimum subscription amount. Almost immediately the small business online CRM application can be accessed and used in a secure hassle-free manner, without expensive installation or customization. Also, they are location and computer independent, so CRM users can access the software from anywhere at any time.

Web based CRM is a flexible and cost-effective business model. This model is said to decrease cost and allows a company to focus more resources on its main business areas. The operating costs are much lower as web based CRM systems are maintained by the provider and not by the subscriber. Data backup and other security, software upgrades, and application maintenance are all taken care by the provider itself so it requires no additional on-site staff to be employed for maintenance purpose.

CRM improves the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, eases the sales process by automating the procedure and provides a satisfying customer support experience. It also helps in analyzing the business growth and understanding the sales and marketing activities and gives a clear cut view of the business life cycle.

Thus small enterprises can also make use of CRM effectively for their business growth and profitability. CRM is more than a necessity for small to medium to large companies when it comes to managing sales activities and customer service.