Introduction

CRM is a database that is used to track all the customer activities, sales opportunities and leads. It facilitates central position for salesperson in order to organise and manage information regarding the leads as well as customers. For small businesses, it plays an important role in managing the information of businesses and monitor contacts and relations of customers. While a person enter correct information than it is termed as a powerful analytics solutions which enables businesses to drag reports and discover about their functioning of companies.

Freshworks CRM Platform: Affordable and accessible business software

Some of the top customer relationship management software for small businesses includes Hub spot, sales mate, sales force, ZOHO, Agile, Fresh sales, Microsoft dynamics and many more. Customer relationship management facilitates insights for the entire sales, customer service, financial insights, and marketing as well as allows adapting interactions and relationships with their customers. 

Features of the CRM:

It means to assist people or organising contacts and relations of customers in an adequate way. Features of all software are different as it depends upon the types and plans of it that people choose. There is also a set of abilities and capabilities that person can expect from the customer relationship management of small companies. Some common characteristics of CRM software includes:

• Account management: Accounts are referred to the organisation that contains numerous locations as well as contacts. It generally works of holding records of communication which will allow clients to be serviced like their buying details, customer service interactions and key decision makers. This kind of feature allow various sales reps in order to have better visibility as companies may manage all aspects of sales procedures. 
• Contact management: It is the common feature of CRM as it mainly works for managing the contacts and information’s that people have with those whether they are clients or leads. On the basis of several criteria such as prospect, locations, qualifications, sales rep to handles their account, CRM billing software is widely used for managing and grouping those contacts. 
• Customer segmentation: It is referred to the grouping of persons on the basis of their similarities. Sifting clients by trends allows businesses to market their services in an effective, efficient and customised way. For instance, small business could be discharging products which are best fit for their clients with less than 45 workers. 
• Order management: It means the generation and sending the price quotes as sales reps can be created quote on the needs of clients and send them for assess and approval. While customers makes purchase decisions then small businesses can able to utilise their CRM for the purpose of managing procuring and delivering procedure of their orders. Within the context of ERP, the inventory and accounting management is effectively controlled by further units to keep focused on CRM users regarding pre sales activities and functions. 
• Task management: Task are defined as a time sensitive and follow up process to do reminders which can be allotted by others in order to enhance customer services. Tasks are creating by sales reps for the purpose of ensuring follow up along with the prospects. Sales manager need to go through the CRM for knowing that which prospects have not been contracted as well as gives instruction tasks to their reps. 
• Management of sales opportunity: It is related to the potential deals which generates some extra revenue. These deals are converted into leads and moves via sales pipelines in order to hoping for new ventures. This kind of opportunity can show purchases, new contracts or some other proposals of sales. As customer relationship management software helps small businesses to organise and manage sales pipelines as well as predict likelihoods. 

How CRM software works?

CRM works by facilitating centralised position for sales force regarding organising and managing data related to the leads as well as customers. For instance, leads that can be newly generated can be added to customer relationship management, qualified then moved towards the sales procedure. In addition to this, contacts and clients can be segmented and controlled during keeping client’s communication at one location. Without the use of CRM, businesses need to use spreadsheet, cards, contact sheets etc. So that they should be suggested to use CRM instead of fragmented files as it serve the better records of business information’s. 

 

Benefits of using CRM Software :

There are certain benefits that should be considered while making decisions regarding the right for businesses that are considered as follows:

• Manage sales leads: leads can be generated from several sources which can come from forms, chat bots of website, marketing campaigns, cold outreach and trade shows. By using CRM, companies able to fed all the information directly into database so that they do not drop through cracks. CRM allows organisations to setting rules for going through the individual sales rep by specific leads. 
• Increase customer satisfaction: customer relationship management assists in improving customer experience which starts with the leads distribution. Whereas, the clients based work can be allotted so that team are able to take action on time. CRM helps in automation of customer services so that collaboration among all departments enabled teams to provide as well as wow clients by conscientiously following through small details.
• Improve productivity: CRM assists in increasing company’s productivity by minimising the manual work. With the use of customer relationship management software businesses can be able to call, mailing, reporting as well as reviewing accounts. CRM helps in keeping all records at one place instead of multiple locations that will save time of businesses to manage manual tasks of information. 
• Increase collaboration: There are several departments in business such as sales, management, finance, marketing etc. So that executives of company need to collaborate among all by using CRM. Visibility into sales and accounts helps in making effective communication among departments are equally important and sales as well as management is considered as an excellent example of collaboration. Through the customer relationship management the sales manager provided with an idea of reps performance, issues and goals before arranging meeting.
• Reporting and predicting: Advanced level of Excel spreadsheet and the filters in CRM allow businesses to pull information’s that are searching for it. All these allow marketers or decision makers to have proper access to the better information available. 
• Create callable sales procedure: customer relationship management allow effectiveness and efficiency so that scale can be made possible. Which means that sales process of business goes smoothly during managing 50 leads as CRM have well established steps and processes which must be followed appropriately and leads towards the scalability. 
• Shorten sales cycle: The sales cycle refers to the journey which starts from generating leads to the winning scale. CRM assists to cut down the sales cycle by make sure the follow up lead and effective management. Integration of lead scoring allows companies to put more time on leads which have more probability of that they are being converted into potential customers. 

 

Some advanced benefits of CRM are as follows:

1. Contact organisation: It is considered as a first and primary concept for businesses which named customer relationship management. As the customer base of organisations grows then they will be able to have effective system for organising and managing information which works towards their benefits. Organisation of contacts will assist to run the procedure of sales in a fluent way. 

 

1. Sales reporting: In this, the management of pipeline is done which helps companies to keep record of sales performance by several metrics like calls made, deals booked etc. Customer relationship management software for small business assists businesses to visualise and track the entire sales performance through the profiles of client’s relationship. This will aid in distinguishing prospects at each stages of funnel at a time of developing pipeline and providing assistance to growing customer base with companies. Booking and tracking procedure helps in managing their revenue in a better manner. 

1. Customer segmentation: CRM software helps in segmenting customers among the entire population as sales force and digital marketers are work for the getting appropriate segment of customers. It covers various prospectuses like where they have located, how big the deal is and so on along with the customised efforts. 

(Source: Three Major Benefits of using CRM Software, 2020)

Viability of small businesses:

As customer relationship management tool is considered as the biggest market in the era of software that means there are numerous options are available that is new. While analysing CRMs, paying attention to company’s stability is most significant. All businesses consider that what will happen to them if company ceases in order to exist so that they use unique coding that will ascertain that their information can be transferred or not to another system. 

Cost or pricing of CRM: 

The pricing or costing of CRM is monthly subscription model; the average small ventures will pay from $12 to $20 per month, per user. Prices are increased on the basis of number of users along with the added features. Along with this, most of businesses provide free version of CRM along with the concentrated accessibility as well as features. Mainly, CRM companies structure their costing mode on bundles or tiers. These packages in cost for users, storage amount as well as personalisation like some added features. 

Conclusion

It has been concluded from the above discussion that customer relationship management is essential for all the businesses but it is most significant for small businesses in order to manage their contacts and customers in an appropriate way. This tool helps small companies to get correct and detail information at one place which can be gathered from the customer interactions. It is widely used for the sales generation so that it works as finding prospects or clients then gives information to them regarding offerings and finding leads in order to precede effective sales. These sales are depends on the segmentation and sales reporting and leads the profits or revenue of businesses.