In this article we will discuss 5 useful tips for CRM in Small Businesses. CRM is the abbreviation for Customer Relationship Management, which represents a set of systems and tools a busiless has in place to manage how they engage with potential clients, leads and opportunities.
Although CRM has been traditially associated with powerful and expensive software like Salesforce and Zoho, in reality the idea of managing customer relationships is not about expensive and bulky software that your sales team does not understand, or even use. CRM is about intelligent, management of data for a business in order to make it available at the point of use, when needed.
Why you need CRM in Small Businesses
As a small business or startup, you might be convinced that you do not need CRM. You might believe that your address book in your phone and note keeper app is enought to manage your sales activites, you might believe that all you need is to make sales calls, join a b2b marketing g
Here are the top reasons why you are wrong with that approach:
Continuity and Sharing of Information
Sharing of information in this sense refers to both horizontal, meaning other team members who exist in the team at the time and vertically, with your future replacement for the same position or task. I have been in so many organisations where someone resigns, and their files go with them. All the contacts they made, what was discussed in those meetings, the documents and notes all gone. The new team would need to start by re-doing all that work, which can sometimes be lost again if they leave.
Therefore, there is a need for teams to do a better job of documenting what they are busy with. If CRM software did not thing else, but just document - it would solve 80% of the current problems in sales. Therefore for our first tip: CRM in small business help with documentation of sales activites.
Analytics what works and what does not work
Many businesses do not keep track of their sales analytics and do not think it is important because they are a small business. I will give you an example of our first online store, we used to sell hair products, nail products and make-up online. We were beginners and used a shopify.
We were lucky because we could get real good stats from shopify about our clients, with respect to how they found our store. Did they click on a facebook ad, google shopping ad or dd they just use a direct link. As we abalysed the data, we realised - most of our visitors were coming from the facebook ads, but the conversion and bounce rate with those visitors was realy low. So maybe 1000 people could visit from facebook, but only 1 would buy anything. On the other hand, the visitors from google ads were buying more. It was interesting because we were spending more of our budget on the facebook ads because we got excited with the traffic numbers, after analysing the details - we decided to double our google ad revenue and immediately saw the results in actual sales.
This is a good example of analytics and how you can use that do do better business. CRM allows you to have the numbers, which you can then later analyse and make such decisions. As small as you might be, making the decision of spending your R50 a day budget on Facebook or Google, can mean the difference between your business making it or not.
So our second tip on CRM and small businesses is: Analytics. You need business analytics.
How to best utilise your CRM within your Business
Smart Lean Pricing
I think the above two reasons are enought to get you to think twice about getting your small business some Business Development Software or tools. With CRM software being so expensive, how can a small business be justified to use a software that costs 25Euro per user per month, billed annually?
The short answer to that, is that yo dont. My third tip is going to be on pricing and a choice of software that is built for small business needs.
Consider Skhokho Business Management Software, with CRM. As a small business you want to save as much as possible, therefore you cannot afford to spend 25Euro on CRM, $15 on PM software and $20 on Accounting Software - per person per month, when all you really need is: (1) To document your sales activities and (2) get actionable insights from analytics.
Always Record Meetings
CRMs were built on top of call records and the ability to communicate in great detail what was discussed with a client, what their thoughts are and action items from that meeting. An Effective CRM has to allow for the functionality to keep track of a meeting, within the CRM so that you can achieve the first tip of: Continuity and Sharing of Information.
Even as a sole Sales Manager of my own startup, after months in business of chasing leads, I cannot remember in great detail the specifics of a call I had on 12 October 2019. However, if that meeting was well documented in a CRM, I could just do a search and pull out on the minutes.
Every company needs a mailing list
I will save the best for last, as this should be an onbvious tip and especually for a small business. You need a mailing list for the following reasons
- Keep in constant communication with your clients
- Inform yoru clients of the latest news from your organisation
- Prepare custom communication for each client based on the lead and oppotunity
- Grow your business
In Summary these are the 5 useful tips for CRM in small business
- You need to share information and ensure contunuity - why you need CRM
- You need to analyse your numbers to figure out what works and what does not work - why you need CRM
- Smart and Lean pricing - pick the right tool for sales management
- Always record meetings, where you can gain easy access at anytime - data preservation
- Every company needs a mailing list - number one reason why your small business needs a CRM.
Get Started with Skhokho CRM - register today or read our documentation on Sales and Business Development
