Why all small businesses need a CRM

As we start to emerge from the period of enforced shutdown more than ever it is time for small business owners to realise just how valuable their customer data is to them. As a compulsive list maker I am surprised by the number of business owners that don’t have a CRM to drive their sales development processes. In my opinion the beauty of a CRM is that you can’t forget to make a call, send an email or follow up a potential lead. CRMs are pure gold dust to any business but especially valuable to small businesses as they start to climb out of this horrible economic situation we find ourselves facing.

The market is crowded with expensive CRM systems and many have eye-watering contracts for their seats. A few years ago I found a British company based in Cheltenham that offers a cracking CRM without an expensive contract – www.salpo.com. We have recommended them to all of our clients that don’t have a CRM and we also use it ourselves to run our business. This isn’t a sales pitch for them, just our opinion based on regular use, but they always pick up the phone or answer any query very swiftly if we experience any issues. Take a look at them for yourself if you are looking at CRMs.

Having all of your customer data in one place in an accessible format and available to your sales team is a no-brainer. At the touch of the mouse you can see all the activity, correspondence, sales history etc. for current, past and potential customers. In our business we spend our days on the phone speaking to potential new customers and we always add any interesting bits of market intelligence that comes up in the course of these conversations to ours, as you never know when it may come in handy!

We are happy to talk about our experience using CRMs. As an outsourced telemarketing service we regularly use a number of different CRMs belonging to our clients and we couldn’t function effectively if it wasn’t for the wonderful world of customer relationship management systems.