You may often keep thinking whether you really need a CRM software when you are running a small business. Small Business is where the Sales, Marketing and Customer Service requires more importance. You cannot afford loosing a business here. So you would need to concentrate more and put the right strategy to get more customers as well as maintain the existing ones. This would definitely need a system where everything can be maintained and tracked rather than manually doing it.
One thing a small business owner knows is that most customer relationship management (CRM) systems and solutions go well over their heads and budgets. For the most part, CRM software has been an enterprise application -the kind of solution that requires a dedicated team to develop custom CRM modules to fit the business, another team to analyze the resulting data and reports, plus an IT staff to handle costly upgrades and deployment. The difference between an enterprise CRM and small business CRM software is not only the IT requirements, pricing, the tools and features of the application, but also amount of data that is handled by the system.
CRM software is not a big company application. It is a necessity when it comes to managing sales activities and customer service. Let’s say your business is slow and you need a pickup, if you are utilizing a CRM Software, you can look into your database and see who are the most likely prospects to buy again. Say you were offering products and one of the lead liked it but the price was little out of her range. Given that it was good business time that you were having and you had no reason to drop the price but you had noted it down in your CRM software and forgot about it. Now when you actually need business and you are okay to reduce the price, you go to your database and search for such possible leads and find this prospect and appropriate notes that were added. You contact this lead and make the offer and you may get the deal. You can also send promotional emails for such interested leads and get the deal using a CRM software.
That is just one example of how valuable a CRM Software system can be for your small business. Your database and your customer list are the most important things to your business. Stay in touch with customers periodically and they will remember you and recommend you. Definitely, small businesses need CRM Software as much as the big enterprises!
With SaaS (Software as a Service) model, CRM applications have been able to serve small and medium sized organizations in much more flexible way enabling cost effective and fastest way of using CRM for businesses. The other option of CRM software for small businesses is to have OnPremise CRM where the software will be installed in the company’s location and IT employees are responsible for installing all hardware and software components and integrating it with existing systems. This is considered to be expensive and not a good option for small businesses as this involves costly initial investments and having people working on the software for maintenance and upgrades. This could be eliminated with Cloud based or Online CRM software (Saas) where hosting service provider or the CRM vendor takes care of this whole process and the pricing would be based on monthly or yearly payment.
Having a CRM software system for business allows companies to improve employee productivity, shorten sales cycles and increase revenue, while cutting sales and marketing related expenses.
