So, you have a small business and we bet you want to make money! Time to start using customer relationship management (CRM) software! It lets you optimize your sales performance, helps track your sales pipeline, manage your customer interactions, automate your workflows, and much more. Let's explore how CRM can drive more sales for your business and why you should ditch Excel spreadsheets. Read on!
Table of Contents
Why Excel Spreadsheets Are Bad for Managing Customer Relationships
Speed Up the Process of Selling
Help Build and Support Relationships
Why Excel Spreadsheets Are Bad for Managing Customer Relationships
Excel or any other spreadsheet tool is an easy-to-use and affordable thing. It's a classic! That's why many people are still using Excel as a CRM. And those people are missing out on a lot of opportunities and wasting a lot of time.
You see, tracking your customers manually can quickly become chaotic, and you will inevitably lose track of some of them in the process. You may also miss important details, such as their preferences, needs, and feedback. There's also an accessibility issue since Excel spreadsheets are not designed for collaboration, so you may end up with multiple versions of the same file, or worse, overwrite each other's data. (Well, this is where cloud-based spreadsheets can help, but still...)
In short, using Excel spreadsheets to manage your customer relationship is like driving a car with a flat tire. You can still move forward, but it will be slow, bumpy, and risky. You need a better way to manage your customer relationship that is fast, smooth, and safe. That's where CRM comes in.
Speed Up the Process of Selling
Image Credit: MaxPixel's contributors
With CRM, you can see the entire customer journey through the sales funnel — how long they stay in the sales process when they've stopped moving forward or left their buying journey. Along with that, you'll get insight into customer experience, tips for improving it, and practical help from CRM algorithms.
For example, you run a bakery. Someone visits your online store, signs up for your newsletter about cake recipes but doesn't buy anything. The CRM notes those actions, sends a welcome email, and a reminder if they leave items in their cart. If they purchase later, the CRM logs this and can prompt a follow-up from your team. By analyzing this data, you can see how long customers stay in each sales stage and improve this and that based on their behavior.
Help Build and Support Relationships
We've already shared that The Best Way To Make More Sales — Sell More To Your Existing Customers. However, just bombarding people from your customer list with new offers is not really effective. You should build meaningful long-lasting relationships with them and approach them with relevant, personalized offers. When people feel valued as customers, they are ready to buy.
CRM can help you keep in touch with your customers better by keeping all their info in one spot. You can easily find their contact info, what they've bought before, their feedback, what they prefer, and more. You can also group your customers by different things and send them custom messages and deals that they would like. By talking to your customers often and in a way that matters to them, you can make them trust you more, be loyal, and buy from you again.
However, CRM can help build relationships not only with existing customers but also with new ones. It allows you to easily sort your potential leads based on things like their age group, where they live, what industry they work in, and so on. Thus you can create marketing campaigns aimed at specific parts of your audience and see how well your campaigns are doing and make changes to improve them.
Boost Your Team's Efficiency
Image Credit: Hongxin(Dean) Long
CRM allows you to integrate different departments and bring together their tasks. Think of it as a bridge connecting your marketing, sales, and customer service teams. And the outcome is amazing:
Everyone can use the same data, which helps keep things clear and correct across the board
Your customers get a smooth and consistent experience because all your teams work smarter and faster
For instance, you run a bakery. Your sales team is in charge of selling cakes, your marketing team promotes these cakes, and your service team handles any cake-related queries.
With CRM, when the sales team makes a sale, this information can be instantly accessed by both the marketing and service teams. The marketing team knows what cake is popular and can plan their campaigns accordingly. At the same time, the service team is prepared to handle any potential issues with that particular cake. When launching a new cake and promoting it, the sales team can immediately see this information, understand the product better, and start selling more effectively. Simultaneously, the customer service team can prepare to handle queries related to the new product. Cool, isn't it?
Launch Automation
CRM software can make your work easier by automating tasks and streamlining your workflow. It lets you set up workflows that automatically do things when certain conditions are met or events happen. It's like having a digital assistant that helps you manage your tasks.
For instance, let's go back to our bakery example. You can use CRM to send a friendly welcome email as soon as someone signs up for your newsletter. Or when a customer buys a couple of cakes, CRM can automatically send them a thank-you message. This way, you don't have to remember to do these tasks every time — CRM takes care of it for you.
Conclusion
Now you know that CRM is a great tool that lets you track your customer's journey, helps support relationships and build new ones, brings together different teams, and automate workflow. And all these things eventually lead to increased sales.
Our TruVISIBILITY CRM application is just an example of such a CRM for small businesses. Alongside Chat, Messaging, and Sites it's an integral part of TruVISIBILITY All-in-One Marketing Suite and thus plays a role of a center that collects all the data from other apps.
Register a freemium TruVISIBILITY account and get unlimited access to fully functional marketing software free of cost!
As your business grows, you only pay for what you use without any contract. A freemium TruVISIBILITY account allows you to:
- Create a chatbot that can conduct up to 100 conversations per month
- Launch email blasts, start drip campaign, etc with 1000 free emails sent monthly
- Send 1000 SMS texts per month
- Build 1 website including a blog
- 1 GB of storage usage
- 1 SSL certificate
- Unlimited API usage
The pricing is based on usage over the free monthly allotment. Thus it is extremely affordable for small to medium businesses. You can adjust the number of conversations your chatbots can have, the number of emails and SMS that can be sent per month, the number of websites you can deploy, and the capacity of your cloud storage. Simple and flexible!
Related articles
Want to receive more articles?
Sign-up for our weekly newsletter to receive info that will help your business grow