The Ultimate Guide to CRM Solutions for Small Businesses
Finding, building, and implementing the right CRM for your business can deliver immense results. This is why we put together this guide. Because your choice matters.
So, in this guide, you’ll find expert advice into selecting a CRM solution that works best for the needs of your small business.
- About CRM Solutions for Small Businesses
- The Value of Streamlining Your Operations with a CRM
- Ready to Get Started with a CRM? Here’s How
As a small business owner, you face several challenges – and perhaps one of the most daunting comes from your data management. Limited resources, reactive issues, and conflicting priorities often means that managing your data falls to the bottom of the task list; even though it’s one of the most important ways to ensure success for your business today and in the future.
This is where having the right customer relationship management (CRM) solution can help. An all-in-one solution to host your sales and customer data can provide essential insight into your business’ performance – which can be helpful as you think about what’s next for your organization.
In this guide, learn more about the value of a CRM solution for your small business – and how to determine which may be the best fit given your unique challenges and opportunities in the market.
What is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution?
A customer relationship management (CRM) solution offers a place to store all your prospect and customer data. It becomes a one-stop shop to learn everything about your customers, including:
- Demographic information, like where they live and their job titles
- Engagement data, including what pages they’ve visited on your website
- Purchasing behaviors, such as what they’ve bought from you and when
Much of this information already exists within your organization. Often times, it lives in the founder’s brain or in a spreadsheet on an employee’s desktop. While this can be helpful, it doesn’t provide the full view of the prospect, customer, or market; making it challenging to understand sales trajectory and growth rates.
What is the value of a CRM for small businesses?
Consolidating the information in a CRM solution built for small businesses can provide a number of benefits:
There are other benefits for small businesses implementing CRM solutions that are related to broader issues like team morale, customer retention, and even gaining a competitive edge in the market. Working with an implementation partner can help identify the areas where a CRM solution can provide the most benefit, and even help determine the return on investment (ROI) for the organization.
What CRM solutions are best for small businesses?
There are many CRM solutions on the market today, categorized into three buckets:
Point solutions
These are simple and often low-cost solutions that help you manage your data at hand. But, they are often limited in functionality but can be a great first step in getting the data into a solution of choice.
All-in-one solutions
Fully integrated solutions that offer deep functionality throughout the customer journey, including finance, sales, customer service, inventory, marketing, and project management. These solutions are scalable, which means the pricing can vary based on the chosen functionality.
Customized solutions
Customized, or what are commonly called homegrown solutions, are often built in-house and feature specific functionality to the organization. While this may have been a low-cost option to build and implement, it can be costly to manage over time.
The right CRM solution for small businesses depends on the organization and overall goals for the future. For instance, if you are an organization that has a sales team with less than five people, a point solution may work best, given the limited data and opportunities being generated.
As sales and customer teams get larger, all-in-one solutions become more appealing because of their ability to handle complex data while providing process management as well.
The Value of Streamlining Your Operations with a CRM
As a small business, you likely have a great deal of data – but how it’s stored may vary based on when it was collected; who collected it; and the importance of the information. For many organizations, this information is stored across email, spreadsheets, and even paper filing systems.
Operationally, this poses some challenges – which can be different depending on the department and data in question. Let’s take a look at it from three different perspectives.
Marketing & Lead Generation
Using a CRM has been linked to up to a 30% increase in lead conversion rates. Given the competitiveness of today’s market and the resources it takes to acquire new leads, finding ways to maximize funnel conversion can be quite beneficial.
Once implemented, the CRM becomes the central resource for all lead and contact data. Having this information in one place opens doors for how to target and communicate with leads. For instance, you can segment messaging and outreach based on key information tracked in the CRM – like by location, job title, or even company.
Beyond that, using a CRM to support marketing initiatives can help to automate nurture activities – meaning that you can drip information to contacts based on engagement or interactions (or lack thereof).
It can be extremely challenging for one person to manage all this outreach. Some may even say it’s impossible. And, automating ongoing lead nurture emails like this can get up to 10x the response rate as standalone emails.
Other ways that CRMs support marketing initiatives include:
- Informing the ability to create lookalike audiences based on available customer data
- Advancing personalization with the ability to track detailed data and leverage for targeting
- Seeing how prospects and customers are interacting with marketing assets, like website and content, to hyper-target messaging and optimize performance
- Identifying trends and opportunities by assessing cohesive data across campaigns
- Aligning sales and marketing with a single solution to house all data, including marketing engagement
- Eliminating manual marketing tasks to drive efficiency and productivity
Sales Operations & Execution
From optimizing the sales process to driving sales team efficiency, and boosting profits, implementing a CRM can positively impact the work of your sales teams.
In fact, just look at a few data points that show what a CRM can do for sales teams.
In today’s competitive environment, finding ways to elevate your sales can be the best option to drive success. With the ability to effectively manage sales cycles while empowering sales team members with a 360-degree view of the lead or customer, it can transform your entire sales organization.
In fact, data shows that implementing and using a CRM can drive sales higher by nearly one third. This can optimize sales cycles and ensure no dollars are left on the table.
Knowing what’s going to close and when – as well as having visibility into what opportunities are in the pipeline – can be helpful information for more than the sales team.
For instance, it can help other business leaders understand dynamics within the business and plan for what may be ahead in the future. Knowing what to expect from a sales perspective can help support ramp up efforts, like if you need more services or support resources.
And, for those in sales, it can help to improve sales management – keeping on top of opportunities and making sure they are progressing appropriately.
Time-to-close serves as an important metric for businesses to measure to understand the velocity of revenue. This can help indicate a few things, from how much money to invest in marketing and lead generation; to understanding when to predict revenue and what that means for broader business requirements.
CRMs offer visibility into every step within the sales process. This, combined with the ability to implement key operating procedures, can help sales team members close deals faster.
Generating a SOW or MSA without a CRM, for instance, can be time consuming and may require multiple people to review and sign off. Using the CRM to have a single template that has variable fields to update can mean that a sales person can share it with interested parties much quicker than with manual methods. And, it makes it an easier experience for internal teams while streamling the process for the customer.
This is just one example of how tools within the CRM can streamline sales efficiency, shortening sales cycles and improving the sales process as a whole.
Customer Engagement & Support
The value of a CRM doesn’t stop once the sales cycle ends – it continues as you service and support your customers. In fact, seventy-five percent of organizations using a CRM software have seen a significant improvement in customer satisfaction metrics, according to Forrester.
What does a CRM do that helps to improve customer satisfaction? Having all interactions of a customer, as well as their information, documented in one system means everyone has access and a holistic view of the customer and their activity. From a service perspective, this means that customers feel known by the organization (instead of just as another number) while getting their questions answered faster.
This can lead to a better customer experience in several ways:
More personalized interactions with the ability to view purchase and engagement history
Consistent service, since everyone will have access to the same data about all customers
More proactive customer service with insight into who is impacted by key service changes
Faster and more accurate resolution times by accessing all information in one system
Ready to Get Started with a CRM? Here’s How
Deciding that you’re ready to get started with a CRM can feel like a monumental project to get off the ground. The good news? There are experts (like Customize 365!) who focus on building, implementing, and managing CRM projects to ensure success.
But, before you determine which CRM you’ll use and who you’ll partner with, it starts by identifying your goals, roadblocks, and opportunities. Knowing what this looks like can be extremely helpful in identifying where to start within the project, and what data may be the most beneficial to focus on first.
The CRM exists to bring together your customer data so you have a clear picture of your customer and how you can best support their needs, given your products and services.
Your understanding of your customer may be the most important. After all, this will help inform key elements, like goals, roadblocks, and opportunities.
Key things to think about:
- What data do you have about your customer? Where is it stored?
- What do you want a CRM to do for you? Who will use it?
- What are key pain points with CRM interactions?
- What are your processes for customer-facing teams? Are they documented?
- What will be a successful implementation for the CRM solution?
With some focus on these areas, it can help to identify which CRM solution may be the best fit. And, it’ll ensure you can align with budget, resources, and data requirements.
Selecting a CRM solution: What to consider
When selecting a CRM, there are obvious considerations – like functionality and budget requirements. But, there are other dynamics that are important to consider. This will ensure you are selecting a solution that works for your organization today and in the future.
Key things to think about include:
- Features to support all functions. As noted in our section above about selecting a CRM for a small business, CRMs come in all sizes. They have the ability to service one team or several teams. The ability to store all data related to your customer in one system (even if you won’t do it on Day 1) will be paramount.
- Scalability of the solution. Knowing that you have an all-in-one-solution that can grow with you as an organization will be important. As operations expand, so can your CRM solution. This will make it easier to manage changes and workflows as a result.
- Data-driven insights. Understanding your customer on a deeper level requires the ability to report and analyze data to see what trends and opportunities are available within your accounts. Strong reporting serves as a must-have for a CRM for a small business.
No matter where you may be on your journey to selecting a CRM, your CRM implementation partner can serve as a strong resource to help you progress to implementation.
What is a CRM Implementation Partner?
A CRM implementation partner is an organization that works with you to help you through the process of getting a CRM in place for your organization. This may include:
- Identifying key areas of focus for your CRM by hosting workshop(s) to identifying pain points, challenges, and opportunities
- Helping to evaluate and select a CRM solution based on your unique needs
- Building business processes and workflows to align with the CRM
- Customizing and configuring the CRM solution to meet business requirements
- Migrating data from your existing system (even spreadsheets) to the new CRM
- Integrating the CRM solution with other systems and tools
- Training and supporting internal staff to drive user adoption
- Offering ongoing support to mitigate issues and optimize the CRM
The right CRM implementation partner will work with you to build a CRM that meets your current needs. They will also prepare you for the future. The partner will understand how to balance an implementation with the other priorities within the organization. And, most importantly, will undersatnd that there are resource constraints in a small business.
It’s important to find a CRM implementation partner who has the experience and expertise for implanting CRMs. Just like any partnership, it may be more important to find a company that supports your business as if it’s their own to embark on the journey together.
