5 Simple Steps To Energise Your Small Business CRM

Your small business Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system offers great advantages in your effort to convert prospects to customers. Its lead generation, contact management and analytics features can significantly accelerate the sales strategy of your business.

Beyond choosing a CRM platform, making the most of this tool requires effort that can get your business closer to its goals.

A CRM, like other business software, is simply a tool. You need to know how to use to achieve optimal results.

How To Get The Best Results From Your Small Business CRM

What must you do to get the best results from your Customer Relationship Management system?

Here are five things you must do:

1. Know Where You Want Your Business To Be

Identify the goal. You must know what your business is aiming to achieve, a goal, if you want your CRM software to produce the outcome you are looking for. In the absence of an overarching strategy to guide you, you will have an aimless CRM system that exists without a plan or purpose.

Your first step in using a successful CRM system is to set out your goals. You should do this by collating opinions that are important to your stakeholders. This will help you to discover the different objectives that your CRM could help you to achieve. These objectives would range from improving customer satisfaction and boosting sales, through managing workflows, to facilitating internal and external communication.

In so doing, you will be able to align your objectives with your overall business strategy and prioritise the ones that are most important to your business. It will also help you to formulate the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that you will let you know how your CRM system is moving your business towards achieving its goals.

2. Know Your Customer

Your customer is the primary reason for the existence of your CRM system. You must understand the needs of your existing and prospective customers. Your starting point will be to collect and centralise your customer data, using the database and analytics features of your CRM tool. This would include identification and contact details, demographic and psychographic information, purchase records, if any.

This information will help you to create the customer personas that will guide your marketing or sales activities. In engaging with your marketing and sales team, you would know the issues that are frequently coming up. This will shape the actions of your business towards delivering the unique response that your customers are looking for.

To access the data that will reveal the wants and needs of your customer, your business should identify the relevant sources, including sales records, marketing campaigns and related customer interactions.

3. Streamline Your Processes

Your CRM system is an integral part of your workflow. It therefore follows that your workflows must be in order before your CRM can help you achieve the objectives of your business. The streamlining process begins with looking at the essential tasks being performed by the marketing and sales teams.

Whatever the features of your small business CRM system, you must identify the areas where it can help to improve the efficiency of your business and productivity of your employees. This is critical because such improvements will directly result in higher levels of customer satisfaction. A key focus is finding ways of automating the functionalities of your CRM system to improve lead generation, lead conversion and service delivery. Your goal of automation must include a reduction of the tasks associated with marketing and selling the products and services of your business. This would allow your employees to focus attention on how to provide value to your customers.

This streamlining should produce standard workflows for the processes that keep the business running. The resulting documentation will put everyone on the same page about how the business operates as it strives to deliver its products and services. The learning curve that this entails requires that the employees get adequate training in the working and deployment of the CRM system. Properly done, this should lead to faster and more efficient processes that will repay the investment in time and capital.

Related: Top 5 Free Business Automation Tools

4. Generating And Managing Your Leads

A lead management plan is possibly the most important part of using a small business CRM system. To avoid wasting resources and effort in following leads that are likely to lead to nowhere, identifying and qualifying leads are essential to generating sales.

Begin with generating leads. Build a list of potential customers. Think about making your business attractive to them. Then, qualify your leads. Whether you are targeting small business owners or seeking to provide services to enterprises, each lead represents a type of customer that will determine if it is worth pursuing.

After using your CRM to record touchpoints across various communication channels, leveraging your customer outreach initiatives, nurture the leads that you think are particularly relevant and strong. A well nurtured lead will help you to close the deal. Your lead conversion and ongoing customer support will create long-term loyalty.

5. Get Everyone Involved

Having a well-structured small business CRM system to supercharge marketing and sales requires getting everyone on board. Your CRM strategy will not work if nobody knows about it. It is therefore crucial that you must craft a clear CRM strategy, document it, and share it with the relevant stakeholders in the business, especially on the team members responsible for your marketing and sales functions.

For this reason, it is important to think of ways of integrating your CRM system with the other technology solutions that you use in your business. You should be clear about the employees who will be involved in using your CRM system. You must also have a regular routine for reporting and analysing your CRM.

This will provide feedback on the sales and support process from your employees and customers, help you track the performance of your CRM system and determine its impact on the growth objectives of your business.

If you need help growing your small business, contact us today.

Get more from The Business Builders!

Read back issues of our blog.

Buy The Small Business Handbook.

Enrol for The Business Accelerator Programme.

Download our FREE eBook on How To Find The Money to Start, Grow and Scale your Business.

Watch SME TV, our YouTube Channel.

Sponsor The Business Builders Newsletter.

Image by Freepik

Please follow and like us: