Selecting CRM for Your Business

CRM for Your Business Needs

Keap: Best Easy-to-Use CRM

• You can set up automated flows that can send messages to your customers or new leads.
• Keap has a marketing campaign builder that allows you to automate any marketing process or sales that you design.
• Keap has customer support however it is not available over the phone on weekends.
• Base fee: $79 per user per month

Less Annoying CRM: Best Low-Cost CRM

• Less Annoying CRM has taken out the complexity and expense from subscribing to a customer relationship management solution.
• It does not offer great CRM tools like other competitors, however with a simplified implementation process, one can have the system started and running in a couple of hours.
• Overall a good tool for small businesses with limited CRM budgets with easy setup.
• Base fee: $10 per user per month

HubSpot CRM: Best Free CRM

• HubSpot offers a free version that is significant enough to provide functionalities to improve processes and organization at zero cost.
• It also offers users with varieties of training resources in its online library, including invoice template generators, learning guides, email signature generators and marketing plan template generators.
• Out of all the competitors, HubSpot offers the best free version.
• HubSpot, as an additional feature to offer to its customers, has added a content management system to its platform.
• Base fee: $50 per user per month

Salesforce: Best for Small and Growing Businesses

• Salesforce is an all-in-one, cloud-based solution that offers everything a company of any scale needs and desires in CRM software.
• Salesforce’s software is basically associated with larger enterprises and businesses, Salesforce has a small business edition to offer that lets you take advantage of the product’s robust resources and a set of quality CRM tools and at a small business friendly price.
• Its key features include (and is not limited to) lead generation, sales forecasting, account and contact management, opportunity management, and workflow automation.
• The solution also includes an advanced artificial intelligence system, Einstein. This AI program allows Salesforce to develop predictive features that make the program easier and more comfortable to operate resulting in more business for the subscribing companies.
• Base fee: $25 per user per month

Zoho CRM: Best Overall CRM for Small Businesses

• Easy to adopt, easy to use and inexpensive to subscribe, Zoho CRM offers users lots of functionality with respect to competitive price point of view.
• Customization options are not that much extensive in comparison to its competitors, however, it offers many add-on apps which can fulfill your business needs.
• Zoho offers click-to-install extensions via the Zoho Marketplace, and its easy adoption process makes it possible for businesses to build out a custom CRM solution without an specialist developer.
• Base fee: $12 per user per month

Now, we have understood the concept of CRM and how it is used in business. We will now discuss how it helps businesses in several ways.

Find the Right Customers

For the growth of all businesses, be it small or large, the company needs the sales team to get the most qualified prospects and pray for them to close at a higher rate. However, it is not possible every day for the sales reps to rely on regular ways to determine which customers are potential and to be focused on. And if they focus on less potential prospects, the sales reps will have to settle with less of a conversion rate as sales reps begin to contact leads who are still in the research phase, which may put off the lead. This, in succession, can impact company profits and even sales predictions.

Companies nowadays are now a days more focused on ads targeting, social listening and monitoring. With these in mind, Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud is the perfect choice which has features such as Social Studio, ads or SMS targeting along with high scalability.

There are several CRM systems that provide the service of Lead scoring. This works with browsers visiting your site. Now, in your site, whatever action they perform, based on that a score is given to them through a smart algorithm which defines whether those visitors can be your new customers. Each action performed by a lead, a predefined point is assigned against the lead by the lead predicting system. There is a variety of action that can be performed by the leads. For example – page views, site searches, downloads, email actions, landing pages, link clicks, videos, webinars, etc. Each one has different points and predefined triggers against the actions performed.

All of these actions are performed at the Sales Funnel, where these leads are given points based on their actions. The points keep on increasing until it reaches a certain predefined point total, from that minute it reaches the threshold, the lead is considered a hot prospect. This now becomes very easy for the sales reps to have a precise list of prospects they can talk to. This also increases the probability of converting these hot prospects into customers and closing deals on time with minimal effort from the sales or marketing teams.

There are several other ways customers can be attracted and engaged with different platforms. Below are some of the proven ones.

• Personalized messaging – Connect with them with tier historical information in hand.
• Service delivery via social channels – Be aware and available when they are looking for a product or service.
• Built-in social advertising – Reach to the customers via social media platforms.
• Engagement of the leads on company’s contents.
• Personalized actions based on analytics on the lead.
• Personalized and data driven content uses AI to tailor emails based on individual customer experience.
• Transparent reporting.
• One-to-one advertising.
• Discovering new lookalike audiences, integrating with Facebook, Google, etc.
• Putting together email nurture campaigns with sales teams help build better lead scoring.

Build More Sustainable Relationships with Your CRM Software

To build deeper relationships with your customers, you must be developing a deeper understanding of their business. It begins with analyzing their history with your company. This way the trust between both parties and mutual understanding can be achieved. A CRM can help an organization in below points in this area of focus.

Exploring their challenges and desires: It is very crucial to discover what matters to your customers. Their priorities, challenges, goals, and preferences should be your area of focus as well. You must make sure you have a follow-up action, at the end of every transaction or exchange. Register these data in your CRM system so in the future you can pick up exactly where you left off with a quick review.

Engaging with relevant information: Once you understand a customer’s business challenges and desires, you may recommend them with appropriate products or special specific promotions, or other articles that are relevant to their business area, at the very right time. With CRM, you will also be aware of what they are purchasing and how they are seeing your services or products, so you can provide the most relevant content and information.

Build a one-to-one relationship: For small businesses, your customers look for that personal experience you offer; but it becomes quite challenging to be aware of the details of each and every customer of yours. You must be taking the right time into consideration as to when to follow up with them, just then when high growth kicks in. A CRM platform can set up task reminders, host email templates, and enable phone calls to help you connect with customers quicker and easier.

Reduce the Cost of Sale

New customers are a key ingredient for the continued growth of business, but they’re not easy — or cheap — to come by. However, you can now offset new customer acquisition costs through sales to your existing customer base. Have better visibility into the cross-sell, upsell and renewable opportunities in your customer portfolio and you’ll see an increase in repeatable sales with the trust you’ve already gained.

The cost reduction for any department is one of the primary goals for any company. These CRMs help reduce the cost of sales very much which ultimately adds up to the business revenue. The sales reps will need much less time to compute, communicate and even decide on their actions. Lead scoring is one of the offered by the majority of CRMs. Traditional lead scoring systems allow us to work only based on people and their decision making skills, it depends on sales and marketing team employees to decide, based on their skills, experience and data to choose which leads to focus on. On the other hand, a predictive lead scoring system does the work automatically based on current data, historical data and customer interactions. This requires and uses lots of data with AI to determine which customers are hot prospects. Therefore, the companies which use predictive lead scoring systems have thousands of customers and their informative data to make the smart AI algorithm work as accurately as possible. Hence, it is very ideal for companies having enough customers and information to try predictive lead scoring instead of traditional ones to help the company close the sales on time.

This in turn reduces the effort and cost spent on the sales teams for the company as well in the long run as a result of reduction in manual analysis jobs. There are several other things CRM helps the sales teams with. With a complete solution, sales reps are quite dependent on many CRM services, below are some of them which are most beneficial.

• Increasing upsell and cross-sell opportunities: Have visibility to all the opportunities that are a quite good fit for add-on deals already in progress.
• Uncovering referral business: Discover untapped opportunities in current relationships instead of investing in dead-end leads or wasting time cold calling.
• Reducing time to close: Quickly align your sales team on the next action. This helps to close a deal when you have a 360-degree view of your customer information.

Increase Employee Productivity

Your team needs to avail free time from tasks that are repetitive, less productive and which can be automated. The right technology frees up your sales reps from these kinds of tasks and also provides them more time to interact with customers. Manual operations like looking for contact information or data entries can be automated or reduced from customer related processes. Automating service, across sales and marketing will free your sales and marketing teams, so they can spend more time talking to hot prospects and enhancing relationships with existing ones, moving one step ahead for your business.

Sales teams have many tedious tasks in hand in day to day business. These tasks can be related to data captures or to analyse call data. These tasks also include some repetitive tasks like  scheduling meetings, processing orders, sending out emails, and more, which are mostly time-consuming and can be automated. AI helps in automating these to ease the work and reduce manual efforts.

Pain points:

• Sales representatives are always busy with an overflow of opportunities and they are unable to determine which opportunities to focus on first, which takes a huge amount of time and effort.
• Sales managers are not fully aware and cannot decide on which opportunities are more likely to be closed and sales managers are low in confidence while forecasting sales reports.

Benefits of CRM in these tasks:

• Predicted values help the leadership to analyse how their sales team will perform that month.
• Leadership can have the sales figures in advance, so they would know which to focus on, where to give a push to the team.
• A detailed breakdown among the sales teams and sales reps can help in analysing where things can be improved.
• The sales reps will always know when to re engage with the contacts to proceed further with the deal. This makes the manager’s work lesser as now the manager does not have to push and do frequent follow-ups with the sales reps. Therefore, no lost deals due to delays.
• The managers have the visualization of their team’s pipeline and determine the number of contacts to be engaged by the team. They do not have to ask individual sales reps.
• Salesforce reports and dashboards will be an additional help for the managers and leadership to visualize and watch sales performance.
• The forecasting is easier when the opportunity scores are there which shows the prediction of deals being won.

Offer Better Customer Service

Even if you have the best product , it is only as good as the service that comes with it and that is both before and after the sale. Hitting up your leads with multiple marketing promotions can sometimes annoy them or scare them away. Make a mistake after a sale and you have wasted the effort and time that went into winning a valuable customer. When your teams have a close look at a customer’s complete historical data, everyone can quickly provide personalised messages and solutions, with the right resources. Great connections, good interactions can build trust and encourage repeat business. CRM is a great help when it comes to services to customers.

• Keeping in touch: A great customer experience is impossible without ongoing and meaningful communication.
• Your CRM system stores a wide range of information about your customers and how they behave with your business. This information includes past activities, conversations and purchases.
• Teams can use the data in the system to have your existing customers informed with company news, sales campaigns, offers or other initiatives. A CRM system also allows you to segregate the customers and address the right customer with the right message, instead of engaging them all with the same type of information.
• Listening to customer needs: You can use email marketing and send your customers surveys to have their feedback registered about what they think of your product or service. Social listening is also becoming a very useful trend in today’s business planning.
• Creating and managing personal relationships: Customers usually contact your organization through various channels, including phone, emails and website. They can also connect you through various departments
• A CRM system can capture all of these conversations, regardless of the channel or department they occur in. This gives you and your entire team immediate access to the same information.
• You can use this data to provide the customer a unique experience by addressing them by their name, or when they call, knowing exactly what the issue is without having to ask them to repeat themselves.

Improve Customer Retention

Focus across all the relationships will help your teams proactively address at risk accounts and current satisfied customers with opportunities that are new at just the right time. Customer histories being transparent, open cases, or active campaignings, you can provide better and more satisfying purchases and service experiences that keep them coming back for more. Investing on time wisely now will result in strong customer relationships that will pay dividends for years to come.

Customers are always attracted to greater service and better experiences. CRM systems help your company provide these services with ease. There are several features of CRM that helps you attract the right customers and also helps you improve current customer experience. Keeping in touch with your customers, engaging them with the latest offers and related articles might get you new business from the customers. The CRM can capture the information about your customer needs and it can certainly help you resolve their queries and asks in time. Creating and managing personal relationships as well as listening to customer needs helps you retain the customers.