Five Reasons Your Business Should Be Using a CRM

If you run a small or medium-sized business, at some point, you may have found yourself wondering if investing in using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool would be a good idea.

As a seasoned marketing veteran of 25+ years, I’ve worked with countless businesses — both with and without a CRM. This is why I can confidently say that using a CRM is almost always a great idea.

What I most commonly see in businesses without a CRM is there is a lot of redundant work. Switching between various tools to do one task and checking in four different places to gather basic information. Nothing is synced or tracked, and there are countless missed opportunities to improve relationships with clients and prospects plus streamline tasks.

Having a smaller team can also sometimes mean not having the resources to make additional steps toward activities that can improve sales and build your business. However, when you’re using a CRM, you can leverage features like automation, which takes the ongoing workload off your team and improves communication and service with your clients.

Still not sure if using a CRM is the best move for your business?

OnMerit Marketing provides consultation and implementation using today’s leading CRM’s like Keap and Square up for small businesses.

Let’s take a look at five benefits that make using a CRM an easy yes.

#1. Effective Lead Management

Every lead your business gets is important — especially when the economy is slowing down. Not having the right tools and processes in place for your leads means things can fall through the cracks, and opportunities can die on the vine.

One of the biggest benefits of using a CRM for lead management is that it allows you to simplify your lead nurturing process from end to end. A CRM makes it easy to keep track of your leads and ensure that they are hitting each step through the journey you want them to take. Lead nurturing requires strategy, and when you’re using a CRM, that strategy can be embedded.

Communication is also another important facet of lead nurturing, and using a CRM can make managing those conversations that much easier. Not to mention, having everything in a central system allows everyone on the team to see exactly where the potential customer is at in their journey.

Using a CRM also makes it that much easier to keep track of your sales process, which is important for turning leads into actual buying customers. You can also use this data to analyze your results and see if there are specific places where your leads are being dropped.

#2. Increased Efficiency With Automation

If you think automation isn’t necessary since you’re running a small or medium-sized business, think again! Often people associate automation with the loss of a personal touch, but using a CRM can help improve the customer experience overall. The focus of automation is really on making it that much easier to manage your client relationships.

Automation saves time, which is a huge win for you and your team. By freeing up valuable time spent on repeatable tasks that can be handled by automation, you’re making more space for you and your team to work on higher-value tasks and strategies.

If you’re not accustomed to using a CRM and leveraging automation features, you may not know all the different areas you can put automation to work. This includes:

• Reports
• Welcome emails and nurture sequences
• Lead assignment and management
• Onboarding new clients
• Upselling/cross-selling opportunities
• Re-engagement offers
• Segmentation
• KPI tracking

#3. Consistent Client Communication

When it comes to your clients, consistency is a key component of relationship building. Great client communication can make or break a business, so using a CRM can be invaluable for streamlining and ensuring you’re keeping in touch regularly.

Using a CRM for client communications can be done by way of automating responses to common inquiries, providing responses and alerts for support requests, and so much more. Having inquiries responded to promptly is always important to clients, and a CRM can help make that happen.

Another big benefit of using a CRM for client communication is that you now have a centralized database of information for servicing your clients in the best way possible. That means that everyone on the team has access to the same information, the same history, and the same insights — all of which help to provide the most consistent communication possible.

#4. Client Nurturing

Just like any other relationship, in order to build loyalty and longevity, the relationship needs to be nurtured.

One of the most common ways businesses do this is via email marketing, and using a CRM can make it that much easier.

Nurture sequences are built to foster a relationship and build trust at each step of the customer’s journey. The goal is to take potential customers and convert them into paying buyers. Or for existing customers, it can help encourage higher engagement. These nurture sequences are necessary because not everyone who encounters your business will be ready to buy at that time, and a nurture sequence will help warm them up.

Using a CRM for client nurturing removes the guesswork. When you set up your email sequences, the CRM then knows exactly when and who to send to — completely removing the possibility that someone will forget to send or miss someone from the list if you do it manually.

Another aspect of this is the fact that a CRM is constantly gathering data on incoming emails. That data can then be used to better segment potential customers so you can target them later with offers that will resonate with them even more.

#5. Detailed Analytics and Reporting

Imagine having one centralized location that houses all the data you need to generate meaningful reports. Well, that’s exactly what you get when you’re using a CRM.

When it comes to your business, knowledge is power. By using a CRM to enhance your reporting, you can impact your operational effectiveness and overall business results.

In addition to providing numerically driven reporting, using CRM reports may help identify opportunities within your business, such as:

• Where your leads are falling off.
• Bottlenecks in processes.
• Individual or team performance.
• Gaps in client communication.

While the type of reporting you can get from CRM software will vary depending on the platform, there are some reports that you can expect to find in just about any CRM. These usually include:

• Sales Performance Reports
• Sales Activity Reports
• Revenue Forecast Reports
• Lead Source Analysis Reports
• Marketing Campaign Analysis Reports
• Customer Service Reports

Using a CRM: Get the Support You Need

In this post, we’ve reviewed five benefits of using a CRM, but there are so many others we didn’t cover.

When planning for what the future of your business looks like, think about where you are now versus where you want to be — do you have the tools, software, and strategy to achieve those goals and scale your business? And could using a CRM help you get there a little quicker?

You may find that the idea of using a CRM feels a bit overwhelming, and that’s okay!

OnMerit Marketing understands all the nuances of effective customer relationship management and can partner with you to develop a strategy to optimize the use of your CRM for email marketing and beyond.

Contact us for a quick chat to see how we can help.