has been the rage for over ten years. Starting with the enterprise, CRM has now been adopted across the entire spectrum of business – including small and medium businesses.
For the small and medium business, CRM is a key to revenue control. Why is this?
1. Automated Website Lead Capture: While your website can create awareness and interest, the CRM system can turn your website into a lead gathering and qualification tool – automatically routing new leads to your salespeople for immediate followup.
2. : No longer will you market ‘blindly’ to your customer base. With CRM you can identify ‘ideal’ customer characteristics and selectively target for higher results and more revenue.
3. Your business will quickly be able to standardize on common qualification criteria and opportunity scoring – allowing you to separate the good opportunity from the bad – focusing effort where it returns the greatest revenue.
4. Activity Management: CRM removes the mystery behind what is happening with every lead, prospect, or customer. Up-to-the-minute reports can be viewed or printed to help you manage your activities toward accelerating deals and driving more revenue.
5. Customer Loyalty: Because you have insight into your customers’ purchase behavior and history, you can anticipate their needs and provide service beyond your competition – leading to increased loyalty and desire to do business with you.
6. Territory Management: Ever wonder what part of the city, region, or country brings you the greatest opportunity? Don’t guess. Get the facts from your CRM solution. Use the information to sell more focused and to help your sales team manage their territory for maximum benefit.
7. Discover potential customer risks before they become problems. Keep customers working with you, instead of going to the competition.
8. Manage the Top Line: Watching business costs is critical to profitability. CRM keeps your eye on the top line by allowing you to watch the trends and details on your qualified pipeline, sales activities, closure rates, and marketing effectiveness in driving revenue to your business.
9. Customer Satisfaction: Tracking problems or issues to resolution helps your business keep your customers happy. Happy customers buy more and buy more often. The result? More dollars to your business.
10. Growing Customer “Wallet Share”: CRM gives you the insight to discover new opportunity within your ‘certified proven spenders.’ Bringing you new revenue opportunities, more often, and more quickly. Your salespeople and business benefit from capturing more dollars.
Small and medium businesses, generally, tend to rely too much on too few customers – leading to cyclicality or revenue risk in time of soft demand. Small and medium businesses can mitigate these risks through adoption and exploitation of CRM – bringing new and predictable revenue to the business.
By NextCorp, Ltd.,
