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Is Your Company Too Small for a CRM?

A CRM, or customer relationship management system, can seem complicated and intimidating, but it’s really just a central place to track all the information you have about your customers and prospects, plus log all your communications and efforts to sell them. When you take the time to think about it, the alternative to having a CRM is what’s really complicated.

Even a small business needs to keep a list of its customers somewhere, plus a list of prospects, and maybe those are in your accounting system, a word document, or even a written list. Then you have the history of your email back-and-forths in your email account. Any phone calls would be in your mobile history if you called from your cell phone, but does your land line show more than 10 calls worth of history if you called from that line? If you had to take any notes on those calls, they might be in a notebook, a blank email draft, or more likely a scrap of paper you grabbed during the call. This gets exponentially more complicated when there is more than one person responsible for selling, since they’ll each have all their own locations for tracking this information. A CRM starts to sound like a good idea when compared to that chaos.

In a CRM, each contact or company can have all their contact information in one place along with a history of all communications and purchase history, depending on the platform you choose to use and how you set it up. Additional perks can include generating reports from the information housed in the CRM and a mobile app for tracking and logging on the go.

There are a number of free to low-cost CRM solutions out there, including the following:

Hubspot CRM + Sales

Cost: Free (additional features available for a fee)

Custom Fields: Yes

Mobile App: Yes

Reports: Limited

Email (directly from the system): Yes

ZoHo

Cost: Free (up to 10 users)

Custom Fields: No

Mobile App: Yes

Reports: Limited

Email (directly from the system): Yes (individual emails only, no blasts)

Insightly

Cost: $12 per user/month

Custom Fields: up to 10 fields

Mobile App: Yes

Reports: Yes

Email (directly from the system): Yes (up to 500 mass emails/day)

Once you decide to start using a CRM for your business, it’s important that all involved in selling adopt its use fully. The value of the system, and the insights you can pull from the information housed in it, is only as good as the data that’s put into it. As we like to tell our clients when they start using a CRM, “garbage in, garbage out.” This platform won’t transform spotty data into fully accurate and complete data, but it can make it easier to obtain and keep accurate data on your customers and prospects. Read more about how to get your traditional sales team onboard with CRM technology to ensure CRM success for your business, no matter how small you are.