If you are serious about growing your business then you need to use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. Think of the many ways you meet people every day – networking events, Facebook Groups, Meet-Ups you’ve joined, referrals, cold emails, social media, and many more.
Now think of what you do afterwards. Do you toss business cards in a drawer? Do you chat with someone and never follow up? Do you tell yourself you’re too busy right now to respond to that referral? Put that information to work for your business instead!
Why your business needs a CRM
1. One place for information
A CRM will help you organize the people you meet, where you meet them, and what to do next. It will put all of the information about them at your fingertips and in one place. You can keep track of basic data like their name, email, phone number, business title, and company they belong to.
There are also fields for notes, events attended, logging calls, birthday, where they are in the sales cycle, and when they became a customer. Having this information in one place will make it easier to keep in touch with your contacts. And when you do email or call them, you won’t have to look back through notebooks or emails to remember the details you want to reference. All of that information will be right in their contact record of your CRM.
2. Templates
Another reason that a CRM is a must-have is to create templates for activities you do most often. You simply create them once and choose from the list when you need it. In a CRM you can create templates for emails, quotes, contracts and invoices. Think of how long it takes you to do some of those activities. You will be amazed at how much time you’ll save by using templates!
Even better, when creating the template you can pick fields to auto-populate based on what’s in the contact record. Popular options are first name and business name, If you send a lot of email, eliminating even this small step will save you time.
3. Creating tasks
When you enter a contact into your CRM, add tasks right then to follow up at a certain interval. For new clients create tasks for the followup intervals you promised them when they came on board. For a referral you don’t have time for right now, make one task to send a “nice to meet you email” and another task to follow up at a certain time.
Tasks don’t have to be just about following up to get clients. Create tasks to go through their social networks once a week to like or share content. If you know that someone will be launching something new in their business or will be up for an award in their community, create a task for the general time frame to see what the results are and congratulate them.
4. Reporting
With an updated CRM you can run reports that will help you run your business more efficiently. For example, you can easily see your pipeline and the stages of all of your leads. You can see how many new customers you’ve added in a certain period. You can view contacts by specific data points such as region or type of product they bought.
Try before you buy
Each CRM platform will have its own level of features for free and tiered levels. Have a pretty good idea of what you need to do before choosing one. Then try out several of the free versions so you can use them in real time. That way you’ll know if a platform won’t work for you. For example, with HubSpot CRM’s free version you can create only 5 email templates. Whereas with Zoho CRM’s free version you can create at least 10. I use it for my own business and that’s how many I’ve created so far.
Under $20/Month
| Freshdesk | Agile CRM | KarmaCRM | Pipedrive |
| Who Uses This Software?
Startups, small and medium businesses, and enterprises across industries.
|
Who Uses This Software?
Small to medium size businesses that require sales, marketing and service automation
|
Who Uses This Software?
Small to medium-sized businesses and firms looking for a simple way to stay in contact with their prospects, customers, vendors, and suppliers.
|
Who Uses This Software?
Sales teams looking for a simple, yet powerful sales tool to get them organized.
|
| Target Customer Size
2 – 1000+ |
Target Customer Size
2 – 1000+ |
Target Customer Size
1 – 499 |
Target Customer Size
1 – 499 |
| Starting Price
$15.00/month/user |
Starting Price
$8.99/month/user |
Starting Price
$9.00/month/user |
Starting Price
$12.00/month/user |
Features
|
Features
|
Features
|
Features
|
Over $20/Month
| Logicbox | Salesforce |
| Who Uses This Software?
Companies with 20+ users that can’t use off-the-shelf systems and require custom work flows.
|
Who Uses This Software?
With Salesforces multi-tenant cloud computing model we can serve the needs of companies of all sizes, in any industry. Our customers benefit from a shared main framework, while maintaining privacy.
|
| Target Customer Size 10 – 999 | Target Customer Size 1 – 1000+ |
| Starting Price $55.00/month/user | Starting Price $25.00/month/user |
Features
|
Features
|