How CRM can make your business more efficient

As a startup or small business, to grow, you need to invest in the areas that deliver the biggest dividends. That’s why more and more businesses are implementing a small business CRM, (Customer Relationship Management). CRM software not only helps you stay organized and build better relationships through contact management. Today CRM is a  critical business tool. 

CRM platforms gather various types of data about current and future customers. Those platforms analyze the numbers and show the results in nice and easy-to-understand graphics and reports. This is why it is one of the best investments a startup or small can have. Let me put it this way, it pays back $8.71 for every dollar spent. That’s a 774% return on your investment. And, if you have three employees using your CRM, that’s an annual return of $20,799 for your small business.

The Most Important CRM Statistics You Need to Know

• Companies using CRMs increase their sales by 29% on average.
• CRM can improve the accuracy of reports by 42%.
• 46% of sales teams report widespread use of CRM software.
• Salespeople saw productivity increase by 30%

To propel growth a company needs a CRM system. Choosing an automated CRM software is not just a smart business practice. CRM tools can transform your operations by boosting sales through lead scoring, helping you understand and support your customers, and creating optimal processes for your teams.

I don’t know if there is another business-related technology that’s as versatile and beneficial as CRM.

Trupti Vaghela

Despite this, most businesses fail to use their CRM to its full potential. Today, when I talk to startup and small business or even medium-size business most of them are still running their sales channel via spreadsheets! Businesses who tend not to use CRM are missing out on the huge benefits it can have throughout a company.

Here are ways a CRM can make your business more efficient:

Understanding your data

All businesses today are bursting with data, a CRM will allow you to manage it effectively even if you have far too much-fragmented data.  A CRM system helps you to make sense of this, it connects you and your team to a central database making your data actionable throughout your company.

Just to illustrate my point here, when we are collecting the data we collect as much as information we can about a company – including calls and meetings that we had with the clients. All the contact that we have within that and track the opportunities that we had with them. I was going through my CRM data and started to connect with opportunities that I couldn’t close. It so happened that I could close an old opportunity just by getting in touch with them.

It Boosts Sales and Nurtures Leads

The primary benefit of any CRM for small businesses is that it helps streamline sales and boost your revenue. 

Well, it starts with targets (whom we want to get in touch with) and then moving to lead nurture lead source and management after the initial lead generation. An online CRM allows your small business to manage more targets/leads from your entire sales process. With your CRM stocked full of new targets, you can nurture prospective buyers in your sales pipeline with targeted campaigns pitches etc.

Adopting proper CRM can ensure that your sales team can prioritize leads, spending less time on unqualified people who are never going to pull the trigger and have a better strike rate in closing deals.

A big bonus of a small business CRM is that it delivers key insights so you can make smarter sales decisions. It can tell you which lead sources to drive the most sales so you can allocate more time and money where it’s more beneficial. It can indicate which sales reps are struggling to hit their numbers so new strategies can be tested. And it shows what your short and long-term sales forecasts look like.

Make the most of your data

Did you know that following up too late is one of the biggest reasons that companies lose customers and fail to convert prospects? A CRM software helps your sales team provide appropriate, the automated follow-up to turn existing customers into long-term purchasers with ease. It can help to schedule calls, meetings, track the whole sales process. 

The key aspect of a  CRM is that it will help you get the insights you need to make the most of your data. For example, which accounts are currently dormant? A CRM system will allow you to re-activate stagnant accounts. Without these insights, you and your team are missing opportunities and not utilising your data effectively.

A proper insight into data collected by CRM will allow managers or team leaders to analyse how much time is being spent on particular tasks and then share this with the team giving them vital directions to best meet their business’ goals. Thus getting the most out of each employee.

It Helps You Understand Your Customers

The best way to serve your customers is to understand exactly what their wants, needs, pain points, and preferences are. With CRM, however, you can gather fragmented information about your customers and record them. This information can be used at a  granular level and analyze that data to gain valuable insight that will help you make more intelligent customer-centric business decisions.

Small business CRM software is particularly useful for companies selling complex products or companies with longer sales cycles. 

The constant data collection allows you to continuously perfect how you interact with every customer. Months of customer data can be effortlessly recorded and analyzed, which lets you better understand the different decisions that guided customers throughout their entire journey.

You can use this information to improve your small business marketing, tweak your marketing and campaigns, and sales approach until you find the optimal way to reach your target audience.

I always leverage the insight gained through a CRM to create more personalized customer experiences. When you have accurate oversight into the behaviours and preferences of your clientele, you can tailor your messaging and improve your products or services so that they are more closely aligned with their needs and expectations. Better, more personalized service is the key to differentiating your brand and developing deeper, more meaningful connections with your customers. This promotes loyalty and increases the chances of customer referrals.

A great tool for teamwork – Improves Workflow

No matter how small your business, your sales and marketing process always has room for improvement. The reality is that most businesses have a ton of manual processes in place, such as sticky notes and spreadsheets, that kill productivity. 

Your data is no longer bound to the office. With advances in cloud computing and mobile/tablet applications, you can take your work with you wherever you go. For mobile employees, a CRM will give instant access to a centralised view of sales and support activities which is customisable to each individual.

Small business CRM software removes the bottlenecks and makes it very easy to create workflows your team can stick to daily. With COVID-19 the whole sales force is now remotely working. Using CRM efficiently brings your team and company together. Even if you are an organisation with remote sales across the world, CRM brings everything together and allows all employees to instantly share information easily.

 CRM can improve your entire team’s efficiency, from sales to customer service.

C is for Customer

Customer Relationship Management software one of the key bonuses is that it helps you keep your customers happy. Customer support is the backbone of every small business. It not only impacts customer retention but also your revenue. CRM allows customer information to instantly access all in the one place, making business transactions smooth and fuss-free. It also allows you to manage your accounts with certain ease ensuring that your customers are never left waiting. 

CRM with built-in support modules can deliver an extraordinary customer experience. A happy customer is a loyal customer. You can’t force a customer to stay with you, however, you can influence their decision by giving them the best experience possible. A CRM will manage all activities concerning customer engagement, giving employees all the information required to forge the best possible relationship with the customer.

Your support team will have instant access to detailed information about every customer – status of their project or previous support tickets. CRM will allow your support team to discover their online history, their order/project information, and their past interactions with your company to ensure they understand what each customer has gone through. A huge plus of CRM software is that it collects customer data in one place, making it easier to segment your customers based on their specific needs and interests.

It Maximizes Sales Resources

Today even mid-sized organizations struggle to make the most out of limited resources. Marketing and robust CRM allow companies of any size to do more with less because technology does the heavy lifting. As a result, even businesses operating on a skeleton crew can deliver high-level service and remain competitive with organizations of every size.

CRM is used to manage all the activities that focus on and influence your sales and revenue to ensure you achieve your targets. CRM software can take care of the majority of administrative tasks, keep records, and schedule follow-up with contacts. You have more time for the activities that have the most impact, running your business and meeting with clients that are ready to buy.

It Enables You to Develop Best Practices

Business owners can benefit from detailed reports that can forecast sales and returns, measure service activities and track business performance in detail. CRM analysis tools can also follow both short- and long-term trends and problems as well as alerting users to potential business opportunities. All of these tools mean that the CRM does most of the thinking and you just have to act on the obvious.

CRM software can help you identify and implement best practices to ensure that every employee remains on the same page and that the business is run like a well-oiled machine. Having these best practices in place can also make it easier to onboard new employees, bringing them up to speed faster and providing them with the marketing tools and information they need to do their jobs more effectively.

TDWS Your Hosting Partner for CRM

As we have seen, CRM software allows your team to improve their productivity and thus improve revenues for you. TDWS is becoming the preferred Hosting provider to host your CRM application. A business is often only as good as it’s data and the people who rely on it daily. Knowing this, we’ve invested heavily in building a fast, secure and stable platform to host your CRM system.

We have a range of pre-installed CRM tools such as SugarCRM, Vtiger, SuiteCRM, X2CRM, etc. to help you manage the relationships with your clients and increase sales. Our CRM Hosting is built on Enterprise Servers with redundancy baked in for higher uptime. We’ve also included extra components such as up to 10GBPS Port Speed, 100% SSD RAID 10 and automated to offer a stable CRM implementation. 

Know More About TDWS Infrastructure 

CRM Hosting 

TDWS offers the best choice in CRM Hosting. Our CRM solutions will enable you to scale-up quickly and have full security of Data. We are not limited to just a few CRM, almost all the CRM’s can be hosted within TDWS Cloud. 

Enterprise Hosting

Enterprise Hosting is specially designed for heavy work load and high traffic website. TDWS enables you to have better performance with redundant cloud based infrastructure.

VPS Hosting

VPS is a Virtual Private Server that runs it’s own copy of an OS, and our customers have full root-access, and they can install any software that runs on that OS whenever you want. They are as functional as dedicated servers to many purposes, they are much more easily created, configured, and managed, since they are software-defined.

TDWS Cloud

TDWS Cloud Servers, unlike physical servers, can be re-sized and scaled up or down at any time. In addition they offer enhanced resilience against downtime. These reasons and many more, have made TDWS Cloud Servers a favorite of enterprises as well as developers.