How a Modern CRM Boosts Small Businesses

Small businesses are the lifeline for economic growth in any country. They help create millions of local employment opportunities and also aid the growth of larger corporations, providing them with products and services as their vendors, partners, or even customers. Some small businesses innovate and build existing products or services giving larger enterprises a run for their money as they scale up.

Running a small business is not less challenging than a larger business. It involves all the intricacies of a big corporation while at a smaller scale with limited resources and other challenges. Usually, small businesses face competition at a local level and have limited funding might. to take on business on a bigger scale. They lack trained resources, have to be content with a small-sized team, and also do not have the leverage of strong brand equity. Such challenges inhibit small businesses to tread cautiously in managing their operations.

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Traditionally small businesses are late adopters of technology as well due to the challenges described above. Although, this has been lately changing. Technology can be a great enabler to help bridge the gap and overcome challenges most small businesses face vis-a-vis large corporations. Sales CRM solution is one such solution. Every small business should explore, assess, and onboard a suitable sales CRM solution for their business needs. A robust sales CRM solution can bring significant advantages, helping build strong customer relationships, automating business workflows, increasing productivity, and growing revenues.

We look at some important benefits small businesses can reap by using a modern sales CRM solution and help scale their business to higher levels.

• Information in one place: A sales CRM system manages all your business information in a single place. Right from your contacts, accounts, customer information, previous transactions, engagement history, and much more is accessible with the click of a button for anyone in the company. This ensures quicker customer service without delays, a salesperson can get complete context of the customers, their past requirements, and interactions and has more context to sell thereby enhancing customer satisfaction and sales velocity.

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• Integrated Communications: In today’s modern era of social media and real-time communication, customers have high expectations from businesses to respond fast and be available across engagement channels. With an increasing number of channels like chat, social media, email, call, WhatsApp, and so on, it is imperative that managing customer interactions without an integration tool will result in an inferior experience and missed opportunities. A robust sales CRM with the ability to integrate all comms channels and AI bots to service inquiries around the clock is an ideal setup for any small business. Added workflow automation to auto-reply or trigger emails and internal notifications will help salespeople to be more efficient in their outreach.
• Task Automation: Small teams throughout have a resource crunch as part of their operations. With demand surge existing salespeople and other staff get challenged significantly. Using a modern sales CRM solution teams can automate a lot of their manual tasks and get more efficient in their sales operations. Auto-responses, integration lead ingestion, and auto-data logging help team members spend less time on data entry and more time speaking to customers. Automations helping deliver timeline reminders and notifications for upcoming tasks or pending actions also help salespeople keep track of their tasks.

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• Better Productivity and Efficiency: With a sales CRM system in place, sales teams have easy access to contact information and leads and have no longer to sieve through spreadsheets to fetch information. With a few clicks, teams can connect with prospects and engage with them. Through drip campaigns, marketers can automate email or WhatsApp campaigns, thereby, freeing up significant time through automation. Through easy access to reports and metrics, teams can understand the health of the business and track targets without having to manually create reports and dashboards.
• Better Sales Pipeline Management: One of the key advantages a sales team of small businesses gains is to get a single view of all the leads and deals in the sales pipeline dashboard. A Kanban-based sales pipeline board is extremely helpful for small teams to manage their deals. Using the drag and drop feature to move deals across the pipeline, identify aging deals and carry out sales activities as suggested tasks prompt them. A Kanban-based sales pipeline gives an overview of the deal details in the deal card giving enough information to salespeople without going into the details of the deal.

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• Enhanced Collaboration & Operations: A robust sales CRM solution helps streamline operations for the business. Starting with clearly automatically assigning lead owners right at the start of the sales cycle leaving no scope for conflict and cross communications. Sales leaders can tag salespeople, re-assign leads and add notes for their team members. CRMs also come in very handy if the business process involves multi-party workflows by orchestrating the respective process owners with clear tasks.
• Reports and Dashboards: Tracking business metrics can be tricky for small businesses. A powerful reporting engine as part of the sales CRM tool can help business leaders keep track of business health, revenue forecast, user acquisition, retention, and other key patterns of customer behavior. Team performance is another important aspect that managers can track to keep sales representatives accountable. Salespeople can create reports for themselves to keep track of their deal pipelines, aging deals and focus on important deals only.

A modern sales CRM solution can be really helpful for small business owners, entrepreneurs, and salespeople. It becomes one single engine connecting buyers, sales reps, sales leaders, and other cross-functional teams involved in the sales process. While implementing a tool is a good step, driving high adoption of the tool will ensure that teams can gain the benefits entirely.

Small Business teams can transform their sales process into a high-velocity sales process using an effective modern sales CRM solution. A high-velocity sales (HSV) process makes the entire sales journey orchestrated into a step-by-step workflow. Connecting all associated tools like communication channels, lead forms, quotations, and others helps them connect with customers quickly, engage them, and close deals seamlessly increasing the sales velocity.