Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have the constant challenge of sourcing technology to grow their organizations—a task that takes time and money. With tight budgets and even tighter schedules, SMB leaders often find it difficult to figure out which software solutions are the right ones to support their growth efforts and drive ROI. Sourcing the right customer relationship management (CRM) software produces this exact problem.
There are many CRM solutions out there, and they vary wildly in price and capability. To top it off, they can be frustrating to use—requiring significant time investment from staff to figure out how to use all the features that will actually drive ROI from the solution. As a result, many SMBs tend to not maximize their use of CRM solutions. They aren’t trained in them and don’t have time to learn them. If that conundrum sounds familiar, read on to learn how you can skip the frustration and get the most out of your CRM solution.
Leverage an Expert Partner
The surefire way to maximize your investment in CRM technology is to use a partner for selection and implementation. An experienced consultant can evaluate where your business stands today and what solution will be best. They will ensure it is implemented correctly, so your organization has the best chance at using all the CRM tools to their correct capacity. In doing so, you’ll be able to take advantage of all the following benefits of CRM.
Connect Sales and Marketing
With a CRM system aligned to your business goals, you can connect sales and marketing for a powerful revenue-driver for your business. It’s important to consider getting buy-in from your sales and marketing departments on the CRM solution you choose so both teams are ready and willing to work together through the technology. You can use your CRM solution to track customer interactions to better understand what your customers experience. You can then leverage marketing to craft the right messages for customers who are at certain stages in your funnel, and leverage sales to prioritize and nurture the right leads.
Improve Customer Service
With the advice of your technology consultant, you’ll choose a CRM solution that fits both your needs and those of your customers. Perhaps your business can improve the customer experience by offering self-service portals so your customers can easily find answers to their questions—CRM can enable you to provide that feature. If your sales people could benefit from access to customer data on the go, you’ll need a CRM solution that delivers mobility. With these tools in place, you will connect customer service and sales to better help customers through interactions with your brand, predict their preferences, and entrench their trust.
Streamline Sales Pipeline Management
One of the top ways to get the most out of your CRM solution is to use it for sales pipeline management, which is the process of tracking sales and analyzing how to improve. CRM technology can help you determine the lead potential of prospects, identify the target decision-makers to reach out to, and remind sales people to follow up with leads at the right times. It also helps you measure the results of your efforts and analyze where things went wrong.
Strengthen Your Bottom Line With CRM
Point Alliance has deep experience helping SMBs take advantage of CRM tools to ultimately improve sales, marketing, and customer support. Going it alone with CRM is likely to result in lack of use or improper use, simply because SMBs rarely have the time to invest in maximizing their use of everything CRM has to offer. That’s where our expertise comes in. Reach out today to learn how we can help your SMB drive growth with CRM.
