Why your small business needs a CRM
Creating exceptional experiences for your customers is crucial for all businesses. However, it is even more vital for small businesses. Unlike mid-size and enterprise companies, a single customer can make the difference between staying afloat or losing it all. This means you must go above and beyond to ensure that every customer has such a good experience that they never consider looking anywhere else.
So how do you go about delivering these winning experiences? It starts with how you manage and utilize the information surrounding your customers. You need to truly understand someone to best serve their needs. In the early stages of your company, it may be tempting to manage your customer information using spreadsheets or physical documents. However, this leads to unwanted inefficiencies as your team must spend more time searching for information. If your team is weighed down by inefficient systems and processes it will lead to wasted time that could be better spent helping your organization grow.
A CRM gives you a centralized place for storing your customer information. By using a single tool, it is easier to ensure that your information is always up to date and easily accessible to everyone on your team. It helps achieve your business goals using the right business software to deliver on business intelligence. This leads to greater productivity and higher quality service given to your customers.
How you can streamline your sales and marketing with a small business CRM
As a small business with a small team and a small number of customers, you may be wondering if your company really needs a dedicated platform for storing customer information and managing relationships. However, you don’t need to be a large-scale business to benefit from a CRM. Here are some of the ways you can use a CRM platform to help your small business.
Get a 360-degree view of customers
A CRM serves as a central source of truth for everything you need to know about your customers. When you have holistic views of each customer, it is easier to craft high-quality experiences. You can personalize every interaction based on the information you have at your fingertips while ensuring that the timing of your messaging is always aligned. It also leads to consistent engagements across sales, marketing, and customer support.
Get more done faster
Managing all your data from a centralized location allows your team to get more done in less time. Instead of wondering where to find the information they need, everyone can access the CRM to quickly pull any insights as required. When you boost your team’s productivity, you lower your business costs while improving processes. This ultimately leads to more sales and better experiences for your customers.
Qualify your leads more effectively
New leads are a potential source of revenue for your small business. However, not every lead will be a good fit for your company, and some will be more worthy of your attention than others. Without a good lead management system, your sales team will struggle to achieve their optimal results. A CRM helps you filter and manage your leads so that your sales team only focuses on those most relevant to your business.
Key functionality of a CRM for a small business
Every small business is different, with a unique set of needs. The best CRM for a small construction business may be different from the best CRM for a finance business. That said, there are some functional requirements needed in a CRM no matter your specific use cases. Below we will examine some of the essential features to look for in a CRM for small businesses.
Pipeline management and visibility
A CRM should be the backbone for all your sales processes. You want the ability to visualize your entire sales funnel to know exactly where every prospect is in their journey and how they got there. When you have a clear understanding of your sales pipeline, you are better able to track each opportunity and can tailor your communication to only include the most relevant messaging to each prospect.
Contact management
CRM software lets you track every customer detail and interaction. This includes basic information like contact details along with more specific information like the last time you messaged them. A strong platform also comes with the ability to create custom fields for specific details that are important to your business, and the ability to add notes to each contact profile to reflect each interaction. With this information, everyone on your team can pick up a conversation without having to ask repetitive questions.
Workflow automation
Large, small, or a new startup, every business has repetitive tasks. These are often low-value actions but are required for the company to function. When your business is small, these tasks take up a larger portion of your available resources. With a CRM, you can program many of these tasks so that they no longer require manual input.
Integrations
A CRM solution is just one tool your business will rely on. Over the course of operations, you’ll also need tools for accounting, project management, and internal communication. The more effort you need to put into switching between different platforms to perform important tasks, the less time you’ll have for caring for customers and growing your business.
The best CRM software for small businesses will integrate seamlessly with the other tools used to run your business, making your important customer information available to any other process and system in the company.
User experience
Small businesses don’t have time for complex installs and months of training and onboarding. Small business CRM systems should be systems that you can set up quickly. Free access to help content that is relevant and timely is essential. Your team should find the CRM to be simple and easy to use every day.
Reporting and analytics
Odds are a small business doesn’t have a business analyst on staff. If that were the case, it wouldn’t be a small business any longer! Seeing key data at a glance and being able to interpret it quickly is still essential, though no matter how large your business is. You can’t improve what you aren’t measuring. A A solid CRM system for small business will provide out of the box dashboards and reports for basic needs and let you customize reports and dashboards as needed.
Best CRM for small construction business
Small construction businesses aren’t notorious for having the most advanced technology, but when they commit to a CRM, it can have meteoric results. A CRM can act as the single source of truth and the right CRM for a small construction business will empower the team to increase collaboration and communication. Basic features like lead and pipeline management will help all stakeholders stay abreast of the revenue flow. A CRM like Insightly, however, has the added benefit of project management functionality built right in. So users can turn a closed-won deal into a project and manage it with the familiar pipeline stage interface that they used during the sales process. Therefore, while any CRM is a step in the right direction, the best CRM for a small construction business will have project management built in, like Insightly does.
Why Insightly is the best small business CRM software
Insightly is a highly customizable solution that offers a wide range of sales, marketing, and management features to help your small business operate more efficiently while creating world-class customer experiences at each stage of the buyer’s journey. Let’s take a look at a few of the distinguishing qualities that make Insightly the best CRM for small businesses:
Quick implementation
A CRM won’t do your business much good if it is difficult to use or if it takes a long time to set up. Insightly is built with user-friendliness top of mind, ensuring your employees won’t have to waste valuable time simply learning their way around. Plus, the platform is quick to set up, so you can enjoy immediate benefits from adopting a CRM. This ease of use doesn’t limit functionality as you still get all the key features needed to manage your business.
Workflow and marketing automation
Insightly comes packed with built-in automation features to streamline every aspect of your small business. You can use these capabilities to automate repetitive manual tasks like updating records, sending followups, and routing leads to the best sales rep. By automating away your mundane tasks, your team can spend more time serving customers and engaging in other high-value activities.
Robust integrations
If a CRM is to serve a single source of truth for your business, you need the ability to bring together all your other tools into the platform. With Insightly, you get powerful pre-made connections for hundreds of the most common business platforms. This includes communication tools such as Slack as well as social media platforms and email marketing tools like Gmail. By integrating Insightly with all your external platforms, you can set up workflow automation to eliminate redundant tasks and the need to switch back and forth between solutions.
Customized reporting
Your business may be small, but you can still benefit from the enterprise-grade data visualization capabilities included in Insightly CRM. The platform allows you to create custom dashboards to visualize data and insights for any process happening in your CRM. For example, you can see how many opportunities you have in your pipeline and their projected value, given their current stage. Or, you can view roundups of important projects to know where you stand. By leveraging these insights, you can understand every part of your business to make decisions that drive the best outcomes.
Streamline your business with an all-in-one CRM system
Now you know some of the immense benefits of implementing a CRM system for your small business. Don’t think you can put off adopting the software until your business is larger and more established. It will only get harder to implement the software when your team and customer base are larger.
Flexible, with affordable pricing, Insightly CRM was made with small businesses in mind, making it well suited to help your company at each stage of its growth. Try out a free trial of Insightly CRM or get a personalized demo to see firsthand how the platform can support your small business.
