Between my smart phone, google calendars, and Facebook, it seems like the methods for keeping in touch with customers are free and plentiful for small businesses. In my experience people find out the hard way that an informal system doesn’t really work.
A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) refers to the system or strategy a company uses to organize and manage contacts with the goal of improving relationships to drive business.There are reasons why small businesses invest in a true CRM system. Here are some of the top instigators:
1) The team grows. It’s hard to share your contacts, and in particular your activity with those contacts, with other people who are involved in your customer sales and service. A web-based CRM solves that problem.
2) You forget to follow up. We all think we’re great at remembering to follow up, because we remember everything that we didn’t forget. Get it? But when you run into a prospect at a networking event and suddenly realize you owed them a quote last month, but forgot, you’ll know the cost of not having a CRM. When new customers start using AddressTwo, we commonly hear how surprised the users are to find that there were indeed deals they would have otherwise forgotten if not for one of the reminders from the CRM.
3) You can’t remember details of a previous conversation. Ever verbally quoted a price in an off-hand conversation, and weeks later the customer is ready to buy, but you forget what you discussed? Having a CRM where you take short, quick notes on your activity with customers helps with that. And, you can pass along that record to others on your team who may be responsible for carrying the sale forward with full knowledge of what’s been discussed previously.
There are thousands of reasons for small businesses to invest in a CRM, but mostly, systematizing relationships, in effect, will grow sales and save time.
Try a small business CRM for free
Get strategic about your contacts.
Guest Post by Troy Hanna, Director of Success, AddressTwo
Troy was a user and customer of AddressTwo long before he joined the team. As a customer, he was an advocate for the software and found himself often introducing other entrepreneurs, clients, and vendors to the program.
The AddressTwo CRM is a Simple CRM software program that makes it easy for small to medium size businesses to manage and organize contacts so they know what to do next in their sales and marketing pipelines.
