Investing in technology can be difficult for small businesses and startups. It often requires significant initial capital, and this might be hard when you may need to consider other outlays, bills and paying salaries. Thankfully, many technology providers are changing their model enables customers to pay with a subscription model, alleviating some of the pressure on cashflow. If you haven't yet considered implementing a CRM business system, 2020 is a great opportunity. CRM has never been more accessible with a competitive range of subscription model and cloud-based solutions on the market.
We've put out some of the key reasons your small business should get a CRM in 2020.
Start small, dream big
CRM is now built to scale with your business. You may want to start with just a simple contact management system to record activities with customers and monitor the performance of employee's. As you grow your business, you may begin to decide that those extra capabilities are actually necessities for your company to continue to push in the right direction. Marketing automation might not be needed as you dip your toe in, but later on, you might need to form a closer relationship with customers. Many modern CRM such as Dynamics 365 is designed to be modular, so you only choose what you need.
Compete with the big boys on customer service
You might find yourself unable to compete with a large competitor who has the resources to have big customer service teams who can spend time and money maintaining those relationships. CRMs are an excellent remedy. With Voice of the customer applications and automated communications, you can track and report on satisfaction, saving your small teams from having to manually conduct processes such as feedback forms sends and transaction emails, often a source of frustration in a day-to-day role.
Organise communications across your budding departments
As small businesses grow, their products and services change, and so do the headcounts of departments. The issue with that is communication breaks down along this journey. People forget customer interactions, issues overlooked, and not everyone can see what experience the customer has had so far. CRMs track all this, with email messages stored, order numbers recorded and calendars, a customer can ring up, and the service user can immediately pull up all the relevant information regarding a case. This is impossible to do if you are storing all your data in Excel Spreadsheets.
Get more done
CRMs are perfect for amplifying employee productivity. When each CRM user at your small business can automate tasks that would traditionally take many people to perform, that user is boosting productivity. This could include marketing automation, where dynamic audience segments are created that are sent emails based on specific criteria. It could also be automated lead scoring, where you can instantly identify if a contact is sales-ready. CRMs are an excellent solution for getting more work done if you are a small business.
Think bigger
Everyone starts small, but that doesn't mean you can't become successful. CRM's are a way to help scale your business by improving your communications (internal and external) and streamlining your processes. They are no longer only options for big companies, with a range of solutions across the market that match the needs both big and small - primarily due to the growth of cloud-based software.
