If you own or manage a small business, chances are that you and your staff are masters of multi-tasking. Peak business times can be particularly challenging; you would like to see business increase, but you may wonder how you could possibly meet the challenges, since everyone is constantly scrambling to keep small fires from becoming infernos. If this sounds familiar, you might benefit from customer relationship management (CRM) integration.
Customer relationship management gives your business the ability to track data instantly, as well as to automate reports. Information can be accessed—easily, quickly, and on the go—by everyone who has the need to know. Customer service could be improved at all levels. All of this would give your employees more time to concentrate on what is really important, such as growing your business, instead of spending time hunting for information on customers or preparing tedious reports.
You would have better access to all areas of the operation and be able to monitor sales leads, marketing results, sales pipeline, call center records and customer service. A good CRM solution will streamline many of your procedures to eliminate double work. It gives your sales staff more time to sell by handling the tasks of lead distribution and follow up. Sales can be monitored instantly, and tasks such as quotes, proposals, and data entry are handled automatically. This gives sales managers an instant, real-time view of what’s happening in the field, and it gives sales reps the freedom to build connections with customers and close deals.
In addition to the time saving benefits for your staff, you will reduce the time you must spend to find data needed to make decisions. A good CRM solution will not only integrate and record the data, but it will also organize it. Reports can be generated with just a couple of clicks, rather than having to wait for a staff member to compile them, and information is presented in the way each user likes to see it: as graphs, charts, or lists.
Small businesses and organizations typically do not have the funds to waste money, and many of them are turning to remotely hosted cloud computing platforms for their CRM needs. This allows them to dispense with the capital and related expenses associated with onsite servers, off-the-shelf software and licensing, and IT professionals to support that software. Apps that run in the cloud have intuitive, point-and-click ease, and can be rolled out to all employees within a matter of weeks, not months.
Practical Application
One organization that realized significant benefit from an integrated CRM solution run in the cloud is the Adelaide Arts Festival. The group had been maintaining multiple databases, each separately controlled by marketing and sales personnel, none of which could communicate with the financial system. Managing the artists, sponsors and ticket buyers was a largely manual and time-consuming chore. Much was still being accomplished by snail mail, which cut deeply into the budget, especially since the same name might appear in both the sponsor and ticket buyer databases, and thus receive duplicate mailings.
CRM allowed them to streamline marketing and sales functions. The waste of printed marketing materials was reduced, and Arts Festival fundraisers were better able to identify targets who would be most responsive to their appeals. Customer service was improved by better follow-up and the ability to prevent duplicate or misguided mailings, that might annoy potential supporters. The system also allowed them to easily analyze the type of events a supporter attended, the number of tickets they normally purchased for each event, and the prices paid. This allowed the marketing team to not only better target each individual but to better determine what the general public wanted. A web interface allowed ticket buyers and sponsor to input their own contact information directly, eliminating the need to manually key the data. All in all, CRM integration allowed the Adelaide Arts Festival to streamline processes across the board—leading to happy customers, sponsors and employees.
So while it is true that corporate giants are buying into CRM integration, it is not something that can only benefit the large operations. In fact, you may discover that your small business has even more to gain.
