What’s at the core of any successful small business? People! Your customers are your livelihood, and the more you know about them, the better experience you can provide. But if customer information is scattered between too many platforms, it’s impossible to make sense of it in any actionable way.
This is why CRM software is an essential business tool. With today’s CRM platforms, you can take advantage of the abundant customer data you collect every day to revolutionize your approach to marketing, sales and customer service.
Your customers enjoy personalized experiences. Personalizing marketing, shopping and service streamlines their interactions with your company and caters to the increasing desire for speed and convenience. But the only effective way to create these experiences is to have a single unified solution for collecting, managing and leveraging customer data.
This is one of the biggest benefits of CRM for small business. With the right CRM solution, you can bring together customer data from your website, social media channels and email marketing campaigns and analyze it using reporting and metrics tools. Data updates automatically as customers interact through various touchpoints, so every department from sales to customer services has access to the same information. Real-time automated updates reduce errors, making for a unified and satisfactory customer experience.
CRM also provides powerful tools for qualifying and nurturing leads. After all, leads are only valuable if you pursue them, and in today’s marketing landscape, that means building relationships. Follow-ups, promotional campaigns, product suggestions and other marketing options can run in the background once the system is set up, allowing you to concentrate on running your business while the software does the heavy lifting. Putting all these tools to work has the potential to increase sales by as much as 29 percent!
When you consider these benefits, it’s easy to see the importance of customer relationship management for your business. Here’s what you need to keep an eye out for as you shop around and compare features between platforms:
There are plenty of CRM solutions out there, and trying to narrow down the choices can be overwhelming. Reviews break down features, benefits and pricing models to give you a good idea of where to begin your search.
According to PCMag, FinancesOnline and Fit Small Business, these are the top
choices for small business CRM:
Adding CRM to your business software solutions can be a low-cost or even a no-cost way to boost performance, but once your customer base starts to grow and sales increase, you might find yourself in need of a more robust plan, better technology or additional software to handle other business functions.
A financing option like a merchant cash advance or business line of credit can fund purchases without seriously impacting your cash flow. You’ll find these loans and additional offerings at National Business Capital & Services. Grow with National, and learn more about how business financing may help jump start your CRM strategy. To apply call (877) 482-3008 for a free consultation, or fill out a 1-minute application to get the funds you need in as little as 24 hours.
National Business Capital & Services is the #1 FinTech marketplace offering small business loans and services. Harnessing the power of smart technology and even smarter people, we’ve streamlined the approval process to secure over $1 billion in financing for small business owners to date.
Our expert Business Financing Advisors work within our 75+ Lender Marketplace in real time to give you easy access to the best low-interest SBA loans, short and long-term loans and business lines of credit, as well as a full suite of revenue-driving business services.
We strengthen local communities one small business loan at a time. For every deal we fund, we donate 10 meals to Feeding America!
Megan is passionate about helping business owners along their journey - providing them with relevant content they can use in their day-to-day operations.