Why your small business needs a CRM

October 4, 2018

|In Business Productivity, Startup Guides, Tech & Software

|By Lynsey Middler

small business CRM

Hey there!

Are you a small business owner without a CRM?

Or do you have no idea what those three letters even mean?

Well if so for the next five minutes you’re in the right place!

What’s a CRM?

CRM stands for customer relationship management and it in its simplest form it means a tool that helps you to manage your relationships with your business customers and prospects.

Whilst originally designed just to manage these relationships they have since evolved far beyond that and now help business owners manage sales, marketing, point of sale, operations, accounting etc all in one tool.

A CRM system can help you find leads, follow up with those leads to convert them to customers and then nurture that customer throughout their life cycle with your business to build loyalty.

There’s no set tool, methodology, structure that you have to follow but one thing’s for certain, every businesses would benefit massively by having one!

Confused?

Check out this story for a quick illustration.

The car valet

I still remember the talk I had with a friend who was telling me of the a young car valeter who visited his office and sold him on getting his and all the staffs cars valeted back to that new car smell and feel.

He thought it’d be a great treat for his staff (and himself) so went for it.

The cash was handed over, cars cleaned beautifully, job well done.

That was three years ago and he’s never heard from the young valeter again!

My friend told me that had the young valeter simply followed up at any point he would have purchased again.

In fact he thinks monthly or even fortnightly would have been great schedules to treat his staff.

Furthermore he has 10 times, yes 10 times, as many staff now and presumably a similar increase in cars in the car park!

If the young valeter had a CRM system (or maybe just some common sense 😂 ) he could have recorded the following:

Contact details for my friend, his customer
Details about the original sale
Notes about the cars
Notes about which products were used
A scheduled follow-up date
Or better still in some CRM systems they can automatically follow up via email or text

There’s no doubt the cost of setting up and running a CRM tool which can be as cheap as free, would have been covered many times over from securing just this one repeat customer.

Terrifying to think how much money the young valeter left on the table by not managing customer relationships better.

There is a chance my friend might have been a pain in the ass customer and that’s why he was never followed up, but you get the point 😂

Which CRM software?

These days you are spoiled for choice which is both a good and a bad thing! They can range from free to eye watering-ly (is that a word?) expensive. They can take care of the basics or the full suite of your business functions.

To get you started here’s some quick details on some of the most popular options available on the web right now:

Zoho CRM

https://www.zoho.com/crm/

Proclaimed as a CRM that helps you sell smarter, better, faster. Zoho has a whole host of tools that can all talk to eachother so could make a fantastic option for a growing business.

Best part about it? Its free for up to 3 users!

There’s also a marketplace of apps that install to the CRM in one click so no need for a developer.

Hubspot CRM

hubspot-crm

https://www.hubspot.com/products/crm

Another popular free option that gives you everything you need build relationships with your customers. Hubspot is a fantastic option to someone new to business due to their widely popular academy that has free courses on sales, marketing etc that tie in perfectly with their CRM software.

In fact their free courses are worth checking out regardless of which CRM system you choose so be sure to have a look here:

https://www.hubspot.com/resources/courses

SalesforceCRM

https://www.salesforce.com/editions-pricing/sales-cloud/

salesforce-crm

Salesforce is a much more advanced option out of the box, in fact finding their crm pricing is quite hard due to the amount of products they actually have!

Quite a popular option with bigger companies so if you’re fairly confident of future growth you might find it time saving to skip the free options and jump straight in with the bigger guys.

Salesforce is iften ranked number 1 for marker share so they must be doing something right.

If you’re brand new to business they also include G Sutie (google mail, docs etc) with some packages for free for 12 months so handy if you want to get those setup at the same time.

If you want to read more reviews to help pick a CRM system check out the following links for help:

Hope that helps!