Should Small Businesses Care About CRM?

by | Oct 18, 2011

As a small business owner, you’ve got a lot on your plate. In fact, you’ve likely had to learn how to act as a jack of all trades. Because you’re already juggling so many responsibilities, do you really need to care about CRM? Absolutely!

Regardless of the size of your business, your goal is to make money. And in order to make money, you need customers who are willing to pay for your products or services. CRM can help you not only build stronger relationships with your existing customers, but it can also improve your ability to acquire new customers.

If you’re concerned that CRM is just going to burden you with more work, this isn’t the case at all. In fact, a quality CRM system can make your life easier. Because CRM can automate many of the tasks you currently have to do manually, it can eliminate a lot of repetition and give you time to focus your energy on customer acquisition and relationship development.

How Can CRM Help Your Small Business?

Adding a CRM solution to your small business can help you with:

Managing Customers: When you need to get in touch with a customer, does this process involve digging through a pile of notes to find their contact information and what you talked about during your last conversation? With CRM, all of these details go in a single location.

A quality CRM solution is much more than a digital address book. In addition to contact information, you can update each customer’s profile with notes about your latest interaction with them. This makes it easy to develop a much deeper understanding of your customers.
Knowing What You Actually Need to Do: Not only do you need to know what interactions you’ve had with customers, but you need to know what’s coming up next with them. If you’re tired of filling your walls with Post-it notes and missing important opportunities, CRM can streamline this process.

You’ll be able to easily add actions, events and the dates for these tasks to your system. Then you’ll know exactly what you need to do and with who it needs to be done.

Sharing Information: Whether you have one employee or twenty, everyone needs access to information. If people have to come to you to get the information they need, you’re putting a lot of extra stress on yourself and slowing down your business.

Once you add a CRM system to your business, information will flow between all of your employees. They’ll be able to find or add exactly what they need.

Bringing New Employees Up to Speed: You may be hesitant to add new employees because of the amount of time and training it requires to get them into the swing of your business. While this may seem like a problem that can’t be solved, it’s actually not.

Because a CRM system will centralize the information your business runs on and document your important processes, you’ll find that all you need to do is have a quick tutorial to show new employees how to find what they need in the system.

All of these benefits will help you streamline and improve the way your business operates.