Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an important part of any type of business management. It’s well documented that poor management can be one of the major reasons for loss of clients but businesses are waking up to the fact that they can’t achieve true success without a good and efficient CRM system. So what exactly you can achieve by incorporating a flawless CRM system in your business strategy?
Monitoring crucial data
A good quality CRM system enables you to keep essential data at a central location. This simple strategy will help you to focus and manage your customer relationships much more efficiently, especially when you need to take care of customers’ requests and inquiries. When you have all your customers’ information at a single location, it can lead to seamless data collaboration.
Optimising performance
Small businesses rarely have the budget to spend lots of money on increasing its Sales Teams (some don’t have the luxury of a Sales Team at all). This is where a good and efficient CRM system can help them. With the help of powerful tools and better organisation of their activities, businesses can manage multiple customers efficiently. The CRM system doesn’t just help with tracking of sales leads, deals and contacts, but it can also help share crucial and useful data within the business. Processes can be automated to ensure a consistent approach, a bonus being an increase in productivity.
Scheduling reminders
A CRM system allows business owners to schedule reminders, which in turn help them to efficiently handle appointments and follow-ups on a timely basis. These reminders also help you to follow up products/services promotions, deals and generate new clients for your business. When you set alerts and follow your clients efficiently, it also shows that you are thoughtful and proactive, and most importantly you care for your customers.
Generating reports
In order to understand the exact progress and performance levels of your business, you need to include metrics and reports into your CRM process. By using easy to understand reports, you can effortlessly analyse what you really need to improve or rectify in your business plans, and what tactics need to be continued and so on and so forth. For instance, if you find that your sales numbers are decreasing, you can take proactive measures to improve customer service strategies.
What do we recommend?
To help track our business contacts we use a cloud based solution, CapsuleCRM *. For me the biggest benefit is how user friendly the system is. I love that it integrates with Xero and MailChimp and the links to Social Media are terrific for keeping on top of what my contacts are doing. If you have less than 250 contacts then there is a free version, otherwise for full features the monthly cost is a reasonable £8/month per user. If you’d like a demo or training then please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
And if you’re interested in trying CapsuleCRM contact me for a discount code which can be used at sign-up to get 10% off your subscription for the life of your account.
I’m always interested in hearing about the little tricks people use to manage their contacts and how they adapt systems to suit their businesses so please share your experiences below.
