In today’s competitive market, running a business—whether a small one or an enterprise—requires customer relationship management (CRM) software. CRM tools help companies nurture their leads and stay in touch with current customers to cultivate relationships.
Because CRMs can improve your business’s conversion rates by 300%, it’s a good idea to use one to grow your small business. Want to learn how CRM tools can help grow your small business? This blog post is for you and will discuss the following:
A CRM tool is like an address book for thousands of your closest friends. It does more than just store your customers’ contact details and information—it also helps your marketing, sales, and customer service establish and nurture relationships by providing a pleasant customer experience throughout their journey.
CRM tools help businesses to:
Identify opportunities: Do you have current satisfied customers who are likely to re-purchase? A CRM can likely spot trends and find sales opportunities for your team.
Store customer information and transactions: Every transaction is saved in the CRM, so anyone from your team can reference it when needed. For example, let’s say a customer asks about a particular feature in the product they purchased. Your customer service team can find out their past purchases by looking at their profile.
Track your leads and sales performance: Monitoring the health of your pipeline is crucial if you want to measure the success of your campaigns. Doing so also lets you know if you should make changes to your strategies.
6 benefits of using CRM tools
Aside from increasing conversion rates, CRM software can give you the following benefits:
Better collaboration across different teams: Because CRMs allow different departments to work together to address your customer’s needs, it encourages teamwork. They can share customer information so everyone’s on the same page.
More efficient workflows: With all your customer data in one place, all your customer-facing teams can work together seamlessly to better serve your customers.
Informed decisions: Do most of your qualified leads come from a specific channel? A CRM tool can help you analyze your best-performing strategies, campaigns, and channels. As a result, you can make decisions backed by data.
Improved communication with customers and leads: With the help of historical data about your customers and communication tools available in your CRM, you can improve your interactions with your customers and leads.
Customer retention: A CRM enables you to nurture relationships with your customers by understanding their needs, staying in touch with them, and even getting their feedback through surveys. The result? They remain satisfied customers.
Increased revenue: CRMs not only store and analyze your customer data. By helping you make informed decisions with your strategies, it ultimately enables you to increase your sales and revenue.
3 types of CRM tools
Different businesses have different CRM needs, so it’s best to identify the suitable CRM for your company. Let’s look at these three types of CRM tools:
1. Operational CRM
This CRM type helps you with your operations related to serving your customers. It involves your marketing, sales, and customer service teams, so they can better support your customers and prospects.
Sales automation: This variety of CRM can automatically assign leads to your sales team members and inform them of their lead confidence.
Customer service automation: An operational CRM enables you to automate your customer service efforts through a self-service option or a help center where customers can turn to for their concerns.
An operational CRM is best for almost any business focusing on improving its overall customer experience.
Want to streamline your workflows? An operational CRM can help you organize your customer data and reduce time spent on doing manual tasks.
2. Analytical CRM
A CRM is a repository of your customers’ data and your interactions with them. If you want to take customer data storage to another level and use the information to improve your business, an analytical CRM can help you.
This type of CRM helps businesses process the customer information they’ve gathered. Some of the analytical CRM tools’ key features are:
Customer analytics: Do you want to analyze lead and customer behavior to discover patterns before they purchase or churn? This analytics feature helps you assess customer profiles and behaviors, and spot patterns.
Channel analytics: This feature lets you determine your customers’ preferred communication channels and the channels where most prospects operate.
Marketing analytics: Identify opportunities for your business with this analytics feature. It also lets you measure your campaigns’ performance so that you can measure your success and performance.
Sales analytics: This analytics feature enables you to forecast your revenue accurately. It can also allow you to track your sales performance, so you know if you’re hitting your targets or if you must adjust your strategy.
3. Collaborative CRM
Do you want your marketing, sales, and customer service teams to share information about customers? Collaborative CRMs help you do just that and more.
This type of CRM enables different departments to address your customer’s needs. Perhaps the customer called your hotline regarding their sales transaction. Your service team can go through the customer’s profile and help them with their concerns, whether it’s about a sales transaction or a follow-up service inquiry.
5 CRM tools for small businesses
Looking for a CRM that suits your business is a challenge. Companies sometimes make the mistake of subscribing to a CRM only to find out later that it doesn’t fit their goals or the technical know-how of their team members.
If you’re looking for a CRM tool for your small business, here are some suggested CRM platforms you can explore:
An easy-to-use and affordable CRM, Nutshell helps you grow your business through a suite of features you can customize according to your needs. It has the following features:
Contact management: Reduce manual data entry with Nutshell’s contact management features. You can export your lead and customer data by importing your customer data to Nutshell. Our mobile app even lets you upload customer data by taking a business card photo.
Sales automation: Nutshell can automatically update your prospect’s lead confidence. You can also set up email drip sequences so your sales team spends less time creating emails.
Pipeline management: Want to see how many leads and customers you have in a particular location? You can get a bird’s eye view using the map view.
Reporting and analytics: This handy feature enables you to track your leads and forecast your sales. You can also see how your leads are moving through the funnel, so you can adjust your strategy if needed to meet your targets.
Collaboration tools: Team members can tag someone else if they need their input or help regarding a customer’s concern, breaking the silos of working per department.
Do you have existing software tools like a content management system (CMS)? Nutshell integrates well with the most popular CMSs like WordPress and Shopify. If you want to see if Nutshell is the right CRM for your business, you can sign up for a free trial for 14 days.
2. Zoho CRM
Price: Free 15-day trial, and starts at $14 per user/month
Whether you’re a small or a large business, Zoho has features suitable for your company. It enables you to connect with leads through different platforms through one interface. In addition, it also features the following tools:
Marketing automation
Sales automation
Pipeline management
Email integration
You can try Zoho for 15 days to see if your team members can easily navigate the CRM.
3. Sugar CRM
Price: Starts at $49
This CRM tool lets you create customized dashboards to see how you meet your short- and long-term goals. It also gives you an overview of your customer journey so that you can determine sales opportunities.
Its other features are:
Campaign management
Lead management
Project management
Reporting and analytics
Email and calendar integration
4. Pipedrive
Price: Free 14-day trial, and starts at $14.90 per user/month
Pipedrive lets you easily visualize your sales pipeline to track your business’s essential activities. As a result, no conversations fall through the cracks. It also has the following handy tools to help you stay on track with your sales targets:
Lead management
Pipeline management
Reporting dashboards
Revenue forecasting
5. Freshsales
Price: Free limited version is available, and paid plans start at $15 per user/month
Freshsales is a CRM focused on attracting, managing, and nurturing leads. Its automation features help your teams focus on the more critical tasks.
Its auto-profile enrichment feature searches public social data about your prospects, so you can better understand and communicate with them. Freshsales also enables you to set up engaging outreach campaigns and manage follow-ups based on triggers you’ve set.
Its other features include:
Pipeline management
Sales forecasting
Sales activity reports
Lead scoring
Ready to grow your revenue with a CRM tool?
A CRM tool can help small businesses attract more leads, increase sales, and grow their revenue. Nutshell is an easy-to-use and affordable platform that can help your business scale. By customizing its features, you can make the most of your CRM investment for your business.
