CRM stands for customer relationship management. As the name suggests, CRM is designed to create stronger customer relationships and more satisfied customers often with the help of a CRM System. 

With a CRM system, you can manage every aspect of the “customer lifecycle”. It brings together all your customer information and interactions, as well as integrating with your others, automating common tasks, and letting you optimize how your small business functions.

Depending on your business and the availability of data, you can go as far as tracking all purchases a customer makes, proposals and quotes, and much, much more!

CRM works in different areas of your business.

Storing, Making, and tracking customer interactions

• Centralized customer data from across multiple systems
• Stores and updates your customers’ contact details
• Provides a single view of each customer, communication, and interaction
• Manages email, phone, and other communication channels with customers
• Implements social media, omnichannel and other types of marketing

Driving marketing campaigns

• Provides insight into your customer base allowing audience segmentation and targeting 
• Build a marketing funnel, so you can tailor your campaign to customer awareness and interest 
• Tracks the effectiveness of each marketing campaign.

Managing Lead, Deals, and Sales

• Captures potential customer interest in buying your products or services
• Manages the sale process for each process from initial interest through closing the deal and after-sale follow-ups 

Integrating and automating business processes

• Automates common tasks within the customer lifecycle to ensure nothing falls through the gaps
• Drives best-practice workflows and business processes for best-in-class customer management

Reporting on customer and business metrics

• Tracks individual and aggregate customer success measures 
• Tracks the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and goals
• Tracks the efficiency of the sales pipeline and closed deals
• Allows for forecasting of likely future sales and other KPIs

How can your small business benefit from CRM?

A CRM solution can be used in various ways and provide numerous benefits to your small business. Here are some ways your small business can benefit from having a CRM System:

Improved Customer Service

With a CRM system, you can manage all your contacts and collect lead and customer information to build profiles of everyone your business interacts with. This will be extremely useful to keep track of all your customers and provide you with important information to better understand each of your customer’s behavior like purchase records, and previous interactions with your contacts across different platforms like website, email, or social media. That way you’ll be able to address issues with best practices and less effort to improve your customers’ loyalty.

Centralized database of information

Having all the information about your customers, your salespeople, your processes, and your day-to-day life centralized in one tool makes your life much easier. CRM provides a centralized database with all your customer’s information, making it easily accessible to anyone in your team. If a customer interacted previously with your business, the CRM would include records of that interaction which can be extremely helpful for future marketing efforts and sales pitches. 

Increased sales 

CRM is a great revenue-generating tool! It allows you to streamline your sales processes, build a sales pipeline, automate tasks and analyze your sales data which will lead to increased sales and sales productivity. 

Higher Efficiency

A CRM allows you to have your major daily business functions in one place, this makes a better workflow, an easier collaboration between your team members, and better project management. This task automation eliminates repetitive work and gives you more time for cognitive tasks. Also, its analytical tools make your data available, intelligible, and relevant to your business needs. All your sales, finance, and marketing data flow into CRM and become visible metrics that will provide your business with a better insight that will allow you to change or improve your efforts.

More Transparency 

A CRM system allows everyone on your team to gain visibility of your processes and foster transparency throughout your business by showing work, assigning tasks, and detailing who is exactly doing what. This will allow your collaborators to foster mutual understanding and collaboration. 

Conclusion

CRMs can revolutionize how you manage customers and make sales in your small business. It can be as simple or as complex as you want to make it, you can put them at the heart of your business and run many of your critical functions through them or limit them to very specific processes like communications or the sales pipeline.

Incorporating CRM can bring together different processes and systems in one place, allowing you to market your products or services better, segment your customers, gain customers, and organize your business processes so all the team members are aligned to pursue the same objectives and make your small business thrive.