Customer relationship management (CRM) software gives small businesses a centralized system for organizing lead and customer data, better managing opportunities, and interacting with prospects and customers. It ensures no lead or prospect falls through the crack and that they’re all effectively passed through the sales funnel.
Most importantly, CRM software helps businesses deliver excellent customer service across multiple touchpoints. In this post, we’ll discuss how to pick the best small business CRM software.
Article Contents
Tips To Find The Best CRM Software For Small Businesses
These points will make your search super easy:
1. Understand Why You Need CRM Software
The most important thing is to know the reasons why you need CRM software. This will help you narrow down the myriad options available.
Do you need software that will provide you with qualitative insights into how your sales teams work? Do you need to manage a growing customer base more efficiently? Do you want to better track marketing campaigns? Do you want to boost your lead generation? Do you want to reduce customer churn?
Choose a system that fits in with your organization’s primary goals.
2. Easy Add-Ons
One of the things to look out for amongst the many available options is if you could include add-ons easily – also known as extensibility.
Can you extend your CRM software with additional modules? Because, as your business will grow you will need add ons. Moreover, check whether you can add marketing automation tools, such as MailChimp, Oracle, ClickDimensions, and more to the CRM.
3. Consider A Cloud-Based CRM Software System
A cloud-based CRM is the first choice of all businesses regardless of their sizes and types. Here are the reasons why:
- A cloud-based system ensures mobility so your team can access the software, update customer data and do much more, while on the go.
- Since cloud-based CRM software isn’t installed and hosted on on-premise servers you do not have to pay for the space, hardware, repair, and security you would need to install an on-premise CRM system.
- The best cloud-based CRM tools come with certified robust security features to protect your company’s and its customers’ information. Moreover, regular backups remove the risk of losing data permanently after an accident or issue.
- Cloud-based CRM tools are scalable. They allow you to add new features and products to handle a greater inflow of customers without any hassle. This way, you don’t have the risk of outgrowing your software’s capabilities.
4. Lead Management for Filtering High-Quality Leads
Ensure that your CRM software has the best lead management feature to it. This essential feature enables a business to determine the most potent prospects to follow up with based on psychographic and demographic factors.
Like lead scoring, lead management improves the efficiency and productivity of the sales team by helping them focus on the right leads first.
5. Reporting And Data Analytics Capabilities
One of the main advantages of CRM software is that it offers the ability to run reports and analyze data. This data shows what’s working and what’s not so that you can tailor your sales and marketing strategies as you need.
Reporting is the most sought-after feature of a CRM system as it helps you conclude important insights from the thousands of complex datasets collected and added by your sales team.
Some of the main benefits of reporting include:
- Identifying your super loyal customers, and their purchase patterns and creating the right strategies to reward them with deals or discounts.
- Pinpointing the reasons behind boosts and dips in sales and thus being able to create new opportunities.
- Increasing the accuracy of sales forecasts.
6. Cross-Device Capabilities
Now in the times of remote working – you might want to invest in a CRM that is optimized for mobile as well. You want to allow your sales and marketing team to access your CRM system as they go.
It could be either seeing a purchase history of a customer just before a call. Or they want to update the details of a deal they just closed.
Having mobile access means your operations don’t stop regardless of where your customers or salespeople are.
7. Social Media
Find a CRM with social media monitoring features to save your marketing team a lot of time since this will keep them from switching platforms to monitor your company’s social media.
The best CRM comes with inbuilt social media features, which can help you with the following:
- Knowing how people feel about your brand through social listening.
- Insights on the number of social media interactions your brand gets, such as likes, comments, shares, and mentions.
- Managing the day-to-day tasks of posting on social media accounts and replying to comments through social media automation tools like Buffer.
8. Hog On Free Trials
Choosing the right piece of software should be a thoroughly researched decision. You shouldn’t solely rely on review sites. We all know how real the reviews are and how screenshots and presentations don’t show the full picture.
Getting hands-on experience with the software is an entirely different thing. So, our final suggestion is that you try out the solution before you open your wallet for it.
More and more CRM solutions can be evaluated free of charge, so why not just take the free trials? As CRM software is not something you replace in small periods you should be extra cautious before purchasing one.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that a CRM for small businesses has the potential to up your sales process and enable your business to become truly customer centric.
However, it is important to find a solution that meets your needs and fits with your long-term objectives. Do thorough research and follow the points mentioned here to help you find the right CRM for your growing business quickly!