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Customer Relationship Management for Small Businesses
One of the great things about open source software and software as a service is that it gives small businesses access to great software they normally couldn't afford. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software is an example of software that is now accessible to small businesses. In my opinion CRM is software that most every small business should use.
What Is CRM?
In short, CRM is an application that makes it easy to keep track of your leads and customers. CRM can be very simple (your Outlook contact database) or incredibly complex.
The goal of CRM software is to provide you with a complete view of your customers and leads. This means that each customer should have a profile. In addition to having basic contact information that profile should have all the work you've done for that client, meetings and notes associated with the client, as well as email communications.
The customer profile makes is very easy for you to contact a customer and know their entire past history with your company. If your company has multiple employees, the CRM software would show all emails between your company and the customer.
I usually recommend two different CRM choices: Zoho.com and SugarCRM. Zoho is free for a limited number of users and SugarCRM is open source--so it is free for all. Each software has pros and cons and I'm happy to help you figure out which CRM package would be best for you.
Watch a Video Overview of Zoho
Watch a Video Overview of SugarCRM
How can CRM help me convert more leads to sales?
CRM software is great for helping you manage the stack a business cards you aquire after a business event. Whenever you get a new lead you should make a habit of adding their info into your CRM software. The next step would be to use your CRM software to schedule follow up contact with the lead. Perhaps you set a reminder to email the new lead in two days and then follow up with a phone call in 7 days. The CRM software will track all this for you. Imagine two weeks go by and you don't hear from the lead, you can use the CRM software to lookup all the leads that you haven't heard from within two weeks. CRM help you prevent leads from slipping through the cracks.
How can CRM encourage repeat business?
If you enter your sales data into CRM software, you will be able to schedule follow up contact with your customers. Perhaps you want to provide a follow-up call 6 months after you've completed work for a customer. Your CRM software can schedule this and send you a reminder when six months rolls around. By keeping up with your past customers, you can remind them about your services and help ensure customer satisfaction, thus encouraging repeat business.
How can CRM help me know my best market?
A CRM product can help track where your leads and sales come from. You can then generate reports that show you who your best customers are and where you find them. CRM software will be able to provide you with a pie chart that shows what percentage of leads came from different sources. This can be very helpful in letting you know where to spend your time getting leads. You can take this reporting one step further by seeing what lead sources produced the most sales, thus allowing you to further pursue your best markets.
I'm just a one man (or woman) shop can CRM Help Me?
CRM is great for small one person operations. In addition to all the benefits I've already listed, some CRM software will make it easy for you to market to your customers and leads. I think that Zoho is the best choice for very small businesses. Zoho has an email marketing component (it costs money) that will integrate with the CRM. Zoho will also allow you to create custom lists, like every lead that lives in a particular zip code. You can then use the software to send an email to each of those leads. The software also makes it very easy to create mailing labels from these custom lists.
I've got several employees, will free CRM options work for me?
If you have a company with several employees, you should be able to see the benefit of having a single location where employees can see all past sales and communcations history for a client. There are other cheap CRM solutions like Salesforce.com, but Zoho.com and SugarCRM provide most of the same features--and frankely most small businesses probably won't use most of the features in more expensive CRM options.
I'm interested now what?
If you are interested in using CRM in your business I'm happy to meet with anyone (for free) to talk about the options. Just contact KTG!
For those "do it yourself" types here are some resources to help you get started:
How to install and run SugarCRM
How to setup Zoho CRM
View KTG's Guide to CRM
I hope that you find this newsletter interesting and useful. If not, let me know what technology related topics you want me to cover.
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