Here’s why CRM for small business is important

Why crm for small business

Studies show that many small businesses don’t believe CRM is important. New research found that a massive one in three business owners surveyed felt their organization wasn’t big enough to implement a strategy around CRM for small business. In addition, 18 percent of these business owners felt the addition of CRM was too pricey. More than 500 US-based small business owners were surveyed by the CRM research firm GetApp.

Other key findings include:

• One in five business owners didn’t know what CRM was

• 14 percent said they’d been unable to find a CRM to suit their small business

• 12 percent don’t consider CRM to be valuable for their business

So, why is CRM for small business important?

To put it simply, without it, your customers will feel ignored and that’s the importance of customer relationship management. The last thing you want to do is ignore your customers. An ignored customer is one who moves on to other service providers. Without a working CRM strategy, your business can’t and won’t grow.

How are small businesses losing out by not caring about CRM?

CRM allows your small business to deliver a truly personalized experience to your customers. A strategy including CRM for small business does some of your staff’s work for them, allowing them to get to the business of their jobs. Their days won’t be filled with administrative tasks like inputting data. They’ll be able to be productive and innovative. The importance of customer relationship management is that you’ll be able to offer your customers exactly what they want. And this is far more likely to lead to conversions than when offered a shoddy experience.

What steps can be taken to put an effective CRM strategy in place?

There are two major purposes of CRM: the first to create a database of customer information and the second to convert leads into sales or repeat business. To ensure your CRM plan hits both of these marks, it’s important that you collect and store your customer data, create a timeline of every interaction with every customer, analyze the data of each sale, make this data accessible to salespeople and personalize your communications. Once you have an effective CRM strategy in place, you can use it to keep customers happy and to turn prospects into satisfied customers.

Know why some customers love you and why others move away

As a small business, it’s likely you rely on repeat customers. It makes sense then that you understand why they keep coming back to you. CRM allows you to hold on to your loyal customers while also enabling a detailed analysis of what went wrong with the clients who move on. A detailed CRM database can track the lead source of customers. You’ll soon be able to see whether more clients with this lead source move on, pointing to a problem there. This kind of information allows you to track which customers are most at risk of moving on, allowing you to step into the picture with personalized offers and services.

If you'd like to have these types of personalized conversations with your customers, why not have a look at Clickatell Platform? It gives business owners the opportunity to SMS-enable any application, website or system. In addition, it also facilitates international two-way messaging and more. It’s an ideal solution that aids the implementation of CRM for small businesses.