Photo credit: Eva Gross
In this article, as the title suggests, we give you our top 5 considerations for business owners when choosing CRM.
For owners of small businesses, 2019 is looking like a challenging year. The news is full of local, national and international stories that seem to throw up challenges on a daily basis. Before succumbing to feelings of despair, it’s worth recalling what makes your business special and unique. Keeping focussed on your business and what you are offering is a sure-fire way of maintaining momentum. It also helps in selecting tools that can take you to the next level of growth.
Aside from machinery that improves efficiency and reduces costs, the smartest investment you can make in your business is in systems to improve your relationship with your customers. Indeed, it could be argued that investment in capital plant, without a clear pipeline of orders to pay for it, is a dangerous route to take. Investment in the tools that improve how customers find, engage and build long term relationships with your company represents a smarter choice.
Get found
Increasingly, modern CRM tools have to work with all of the methods you use to get found by new customers. A quick appraisal of how you generate prospects is a useful starting point when defining what a CRM tool has to do for your business. We have written extensively about inbound marketing and how to use it to attract new customers to your business – for some companies, however, inbound marketing is not the right way to find new customers. In tightly regulated or niche markets, there may be reasons that prevent you from using inbound tools. If your business sells to a clearly defined market or is heavily regulated, then CRM tools that allow you to import data and run traditional marketing campaigns may be a better bet.
Engage
Once you have found your target customers and piqued their interest, you will need your CRM tool to help progress the relationship. In many markets, the role of educational events is increasingly important. By bringing together customers and prospects to share details of how you can help them achieve their goals, you make your company and products relevant. Managing regular events, whether webinars or live seminars, can be made much more effective with the right CRM tools. The ability to execute and manage an event from invitation to follow-ups and feedback lends itself well to CRM Event Management tools. The added bonus is that because they sit within your CRM system, you can see the ROI of each and every event.
Manage Sales
By delivering value to prospects before the sale, you identify your company with solutions to their business problems. From such a position of strength, you should be able to identify and close sales. As your business grows, there will be challenges with recruiting and retaining good salespeople. CRM has an important role in recording and measuring the performance of those salespeople. A major consideration in the selection of a CRM tool is the degree to which you need the system to drive sales activity. Should it use AI or other technology to prompt “next actions”? For many growing companies the sales process is not fully understood. If you are one of these organisations, don’t try to impose a sales process too early. Instead, look for CRM tools that provide easy access to data and let the salespeople drive their own process.
Manage Service
Post-sale service is key to keeping those hard-won clients. In some industries, providing great service is no longer a differentiator, it is a basic requirement. If you sell to customers who need evidence that will quantify the quality of your service through Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) or similar, your CRM product may need to follow standards such as Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). If this is not the case, then your choice of CRM tool may be much wider, but it is still worth understanding how your customers want to access your services. Do they need a customer portal, or will they expect to log support tickets through social media? Managing service from within your CRM tool lets everyone understand the entire relationship with the client, but don’t compromise on giving the customer what they need.
Understand more
Modern CRM systems can help you to address challenges in each of the 4 areas outlined above. Where your CRM system can deliver more than just best practice and storage of information, is in its ability to provide insight into your business. If you adopt a CRM platform that becomes the central system of record for all of your dealings with customers and prospects, then you can use the data it holds to identify trends and patterns. Well-designed CRM systems allow you to pose “what if?” questions and extrapolate answers based on data, not “gut instinct.”
My top 5 considerations when choosing CRM may appear to concentrate on the technology and the software. In fact, they also relate to your choice of CRM partner and the guidance that they should provide you with. While it is possible to navigate through the wealth of available information, including hours of online video, your time has a value. Spending time thinking about your business makes good sense – identifying a CRM partner to help you implement your ideas could be the smartest choice.
