If you’re a small business owner, you know how difficult it can be to keep track of every customer interaction. Today, most small businesses use customer relationship management (CRM) systems to facilitate their client list. However, it’s difficult to find a small business CRM that caters to your company.
While you can continue using Excel as your CRM, it can be severely limited in scope. We’ll show you how a specialized CRM for small businesses can enhance your workflow and which benefits, tools, and features you should prioritize.
Are you interested in upgrading your current CRM for your small business? Book a demo with us today! We’ll walk you through the benefits we’ve seen when small businesses use Hooked CRM. Plus, we can help you identify the flaws in your current process and suggest remedies.
What is a CRM for Small Business?
Customer Relationship Management platforms, or CRMs, are specialized programs designed to facilitate the relationship between your business and potential clients. For small businesses, that relationship matters more than the average company, as every customer interaction is a potential sales opportunity, and word of mouth is especially powerful if you’re starting your business.
New businesses typically rely on spreadsheets (such as Excel or Google Sheets) and email when they are starting. However, these systems are severely limited in scope, making it easy for potential leads to be buried in the cells. If you ever plan to expand your business by taking on more clients or employees, having a CRM track all the data is important for a thriving business.
Why Small Businesses Need a CRM
CRMs make it easy to identify which customers need more attention to become lifelong supporters of your business, fine-tune your call center training and enhance your customer journey map.
We highly recommend investing in a CRM for your business because it’ll increase your potential for sales, appointments, and more. Depending on your industry, you can adjust and keep track of your goals in a simple interface — giving you an overhead view of your business.
Especially if you plan to grow your business, having a CRM is essential to keeping your book of business orderly.
Here are some signs that signal your need for a CRM:
- Leads getting missed: If you’re unable to catch up with your leads, it’s time to think about investing in a CRM.
- Lack of workflow visibility: If managers and admins can’t discern what is going on in their team, CRMs can help fill the void.
- Unknown success metrics: You need to know if you are succeeding as a company, and without a clear way to track clients, you should consider investing in a CRM.
Must-Have Features in a Small Business CRM
Each CRM is unique and focuses on different features designed to elevate your business. Before you purchase a new CRM or upgrade your existing one, you should consider what makes sense for your business.
Here are some important features you should consider:
Contact & Lead Management
Contact and lead management is the baseline requirement for a CRM.
Your CRM should log every interaction you have with your customers — from the call center to emails – CRMs keep track for you so you don’t have to worry about missing vital information. If you are contacting your customers through various channels, you will want to consider a CRM that either includes VoIP dialer features or has omnichannel support.
CRMs should track basic customer information and keep the conversation going. By offering different ways to interact with customers, CRMs give a unique opportunity to engage customers in their preferred method. With proper lead management, you can convert at a higher rate, shorten sales cycles, and reach customers more effectively.
Sales Pipeline Tracking
CRMs streamline the sales pipeline by providing clear metrics and goals. It can be difficult to track each lead through their customer journey, but CRMs categorize and prioritize the leads you should focus on.
Without a proper CRM, you will need to remember all the clients you need to contact, which takes time away from selling or scheduling appointments.
Email Integration & Marketing Automation
Customer retention is an important part of your business. Building trustworthy relationships can keep your clients coming back, especially if they had an overwhelmingly positive experience. Email is an effective way to keep your customers thinking about your company and coming back to it when they need a similar service.
We recommend investing in a CRM with automatic email capabilities that notifies you when you need to send an email to clients. With the latter, you can personalize your message to create a deeper relationship.
Reporting & Analytics
Beyond tracking customer interactions, CRMs are useful for tracing ROI. After every interaction, your call representatives or agents should submit a disposition report categorizing your leads, so you’re never unaware of where they are in your workflow.
These reports show managers a comprehensive view of the company and identify those who might need additional customer interaction or call center training.
Depending on the CRM, its analytics can help you understand where you’re losing your customers and refine your workflow.
Integrations
You will want your CRM to integrate seamlessly with your current tools and programs. The last thing you want at your company is wasted time, so having your programs exchange the necessary information expedites your workflow.
For example, if you run a call center, you’ll want your dialer to send all the calls to your CRM to digest and evaluate the interaction. If your call representatives have to download the call from your dialer and upload it to your CRM, that’s time that could be used on more leads.
However, there is one exception to this rule: if you invest in an all-in-one CRM program. By consolidating diverse functionalities into a single platform, these all-in-one CRMs ensure that various tools work in harmony, effectively removing the requirement for standalone software.
AI & Automation Capabilities
AI functions and automations have become a standard in the CRM industry. We highly recommend researching their AI assistant options to see what matches your workflow. Certain CRMs will employ AI assistants specializing in particular fields, so they might not be suited for your process.
If you are searching for an AI assistant, we recommend investing in one that has automation capabilities. For call centers in particular, AI that can handle field entries and generate call summaries for agents and representatives is an advantage that can’t be ignored. This frees them to contact more leads and increase revenue.
Free vs. Paid: What You Actually Get
There are a few free CRMs out there for small businesses, and if you’re savvy enough, you can get Excel to work as a temporary CRM while you get your start. However, free CRMs are rarely the right choice for your business.
Most offer a “trial” period or provide you with a limited number of fields or integrations. Instead of being an asset, it can become a frustrating burden. Free CRMs are enough when you are just starting or you have a small customer base. However, it just doesn’t keep up with paid CRM options. Especially if you’re looking to increase workplace efficiency, investing in a CRM that handles an endless number of contacts is essential.
Paid CRMs offer you custom solutions for your business and a deeper understanding of your clients. Depending on the tool you choose, your workflow’s pain points can be quickly identified, and every metric logged for your analysis. By unlocking the potential of your CRM, your team can become more efficient and effective.
How to Choose the Right CRM for Your Small Business
Choosing the right CRM for your small business will depend on your priorities. Each CRM is different and specializes in features or industries, so evaluate your team and determine what you’d like to accomplish with your CRM. Here are the steps you should take before evaluating which CRM will work for your business:
- What’s your business?: Are you invested in sales, marketing, or bookkeeping? Determine what you need and focus on the CRMs that highlight your features.
- How do you identify success?: Determine what you use to evaluate your business success.
- Are there any additional features you’d find useful?: If there are any bonus features you can use, you should consider that CRM for your business.
- What do their AI features look like?: Your CRM should have AI features that enhance your workflow.
CRM for Specific Small Business Types
Evaluating your small business is essential to determining the focus of your CRM. Here are just a few different business types and the CRM features you should consider:
CRM for Small Consulting Businesses
Small consulting businesses should focus on CRMs specializing in lead tracking. Consulting requires your representatives to know exactly where each lead is in your business, so a CRM that evaluates each step of your process will help you stay organized and prioritize your client list.
Automatic emailing is a plus if you need to engage with your customers quickly, and we recommend a CRM with an AI assistant trained on responding to your clients.
CRM for Small Construction Businesses
With construction businesses, payment tracking is essential to funding labor and material costs. Your CRM should focus on tracking where money is coming in and out to ensure your business is profiting. Since most project payments are given based on the metrics and goals you hit, CRMs that can track the overall workflow of the project keep you organized to fulfill the necessary tasks.
CRM for Small Manufacturing Businesses
Small manufacturing businesses need to account for the orders. Whether that’s via an online portal or phone, every order should be sent to your CRM for evaluation. Once they are submitted, it will let you know exactly what needs to be done in the current workflow.
Order tracking should be a simple process that prioritizes the key processes to ensure your customers keep coming back to your business.
CRM for Small Real Estate Businesses
Real estate business owners should invest in a CRM that specializes in scheduling. Agents will be moving to various locations to meet clients and show them properties. Having an organized schedule showing every lead should be a priority in their decision.
An automated messaging system will also benefit when keeping up with your relationship with your clients.
HIPAA-Compliant CRM
If you’re in the medical field, having a HIPAA-compliant CRM is essential for your business. One of the worst things that can happen is the release of patient information due to a leak in your CRM.
In addition to patient scheduling, HIPAA compliance and PII protection should be the top priority in your CRM decision-making process.
Implementing a CRM for Your Small Business
When you first purchase your CRM, there are a few steps you’ll need to take to ensure a smooth transition from your previous workflow to the current, streamlined version.
- Transfer all previous data: The CRM provider should walk you through sending your data to their CRM. Create an adoption plan: Work with the CRM specialists to create a new process for you and your team.
- Integrate your tools: If you are working with several tools, ensure you can integrate them and understand the process for doing so.
- Generate a new workflow: With a new CRM, your workflow will need refreshing to best engage with the new features.
You should always work with your new CRM provider to ensure the best transition to their CRM and to utilize all its features.
How Hooked CRM Works for Small Businesses
Hooked CRM is the perfect CRM for your small business. It combines a CRM, dialer, and AI assistance on one platform, so you don’t have to worry about integrating with other platforms or babysitting various tools since it’ll all be on one page. With a clean interface showing you the essentials of your business, Hooked CRM has everything you’d want for your small business without the noise that other CRMs bring.
We work with your team to ensure you are using all the features of Hooked CRM, so you are getting the most out of your purchase. And with our suite of AI tools, you’ll have all your information at your fingertips.
Book a demo with us today, and we’ll walk you through all the essential features and ways we can assist you with your workflow!
