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How to Find the Best CRM for Small or Medium-sized Organization

In this blog post, we will help you find the best CRM for small or medium businesses by looking at the benefits of using CRM and what you should look for when choosing the right one for your organization.

8 min read

Tatiana Ogurtsovskaia

Tatiana Ogurtsovskaia

Mar 30, 2021

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How to Find the Best CRM for Small or Medium-sized Organization

The aim of every business, small, medium, or large, is growth; to do this, you need the right gear. Customer Relationship Management tools(CRMs) are technologies that will help you achieve growth by streamlining processes, enhancing productivity, and, through pipeline visibility, maximizing sales. A typical CRM is a single platform where you can keep all the vital information about your customers, enabling you to nurture customer relationships and encourage customer loyalty, resulting in revenue growth.

CRMs are vital for growth and therefore essential for every company. However, as CRMs vary in pricing, features, and complexity. So when you are looking for the right CRM for your business, it is important to know what features are essential to help you grow.

We have developed this handy guide to help you better understand what a CRM is and, as a small or medium-sized business, what features you should be looking for to make sure you find the right CRM system for you.

What Is A CRM

A CRM is a client-centric technology that will help you to manage and nurture current and potential customer relationships. By collecting and analyzing data, CRMs provide valuable insights into your customers’ needs, providing the information to personalize interactions and build long-term customer relationships. CRM systems help you to better understand your customers, therefore, increasing sales and driving overall growth.

While every CRM is different, the common CRM benefits are:

  • Providing a clear overview of what is in your sales pipeline.
  • Helping to automate repetitive tasks.
  • Storing information and data on every deal and customer, enabling you to nurture customer relationships.
  • Allowing you to measure team and individual performance and analyze all kinds of sales-related data in order to improve processes and forecast more accurately.
  • Streamlining communication with customers and potential customers.

Without effective organization, managing clients’ and potential clients’ portfolios can become complicated and time-consuming, resulting in clients falling through the cracks. A CRM helps you streamline processes, automate tasks, and have a clear overview of where each client is at and what you need to do to close the deal. 

Along with bringing transparency and visibility into your processes, by gathering data, your CRM can help you to understand who your ideal customers are, showing you where to invest money to help you scale your organization.

Best CRM Tools

CRMs play a key role in improving customer relationships; deciding whether you need one is the easy part; choosing the right software that caters to your unique business requirements is more challenging. As CRM can benefit a company in a number of ways, when selecting one for your SME, you should look carefully at your company’s goals, evaluating which of the below features and system capabilities are essential to help you reach those goals and objectives. 

User-Friendly Design

Usability is arguably the most important feature of a CRM for small to medium-sized businesses. With limited resources, a poorly designed interface with clunky features and long setup processes will only add to the workload. If you have an easy-to-use CRM that is user-friendly and easily customizable, your team will quickly adapt and is more likely to utilize all of its features.

Customization

Every business is different; every target market is different; the best CRMs have the ability to customize features to suit your business and customers’ needs. Enabling you to tailor sales and marketing activities to align with your goals, such as pipeline stages, templates, activities, metrics, filters, and forms will allow you to operate as profitably as possible. While it is important to have customizable features, sometimes less is more as you don’t want to make your processes over-complicated and clunky or spend additional time and money on a specialized team to manage the custom coding. CRMs with the right balance of customization will enable you to optimize efficiency.

Seamless Integration

For a business to optimize its growth, a CRM will need to work with a number of other tools such as email, social media, and customer service systems. The ability for seamless integration with third-party apps is vital to creating a healthy ecosystem, enabling you to get the most out of your workflows and optimizing productivity.

Lead Management and Qualification

Generating, nurturing, and converting leads is vital to your business growth. Lead management allows you to store contact information such as names, addresses, and social media handles, as well as keep records of the conversations and interactions made between customer and your company. Along with being able to access vital information quickly, it enables you to better understand the customer and to ensure that your processes are tailored to their needs. Along with nurturing relationships, lead management consists of a visual pipeline where you can have an overview of the sale process and understand what stage of the pipeline your lead is in.

Automation

Employees of small to medium businesses are often required to be a jack of all trades; CRMs can help achieve significant workflow improvements. Through workflow automation, a CRM can help to minimize the time spent on mundane tasks such as data entry, database updates, email sequences, deal progression, reporting, and lead qualification, enabling the team to focus their time and energy on selling.

Data and Reporting

Accurate data and reporting play a key role in the success of a business, having valuable data insights easily accessible enable you to forecast accurately and make business decisions that optimize growth.

Your CRM should be able to gather and analyze data on a range of KPIs associated with deals, leads, sales reps, and overall revenue. Along with calculating statistics, your CRM should provide a dashboard that displays the data clearly and concisely, enabling all levels of employees, including senior management, to get a quick yet clear overview of where the company is at and what needs to be done to reach targets.

Security

As small and medium businesses are unlikely to have a whole team dedicated to security, ensuring that your CRM software provider is secure is incredibly important. Businesses are responsible for keeping client data safe and secure, with data breaches that can have serious repercussions, affecting a business’s reputation and resulting in significant fines. Along with features such as two-factor authentication, encryption, and extensive data backup strategies, CRMs with security profiles can enable for role-based access control ensuring for greater protection of customer data.,

How To Find The Right CRMs For Your Organisations

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Best CRM For Small Businesses

Often small businesses are still using traditional organization tools to run their organizations, such as spreadsheets, to-do lists, and manual emailing. While these tools are all cheap, invaluable, and get the job done, they actually end up costing more in the long run. Time is money, and as a CRM can automate time-consuming tasks and stop the human error from missing opportunities, investing in a CRM will help to save you money. Along with automation, a CRM’s data visualization technologies enable you to dive deeper into your data and metrics, identifying sales trends and providing hidden knowledge about your customers.

CRMs with all the bells and whistles can end up being expensive and therefore unaffordable for small organizations. The best CRM for small businesses are those that are easy to set up and easy to use and that comes with customizable plans at an affordable price, as well as the ability to upgrade and add features as they grow.

Best CRM For Medium Businesses

Along with having a user-friendly design, the best CRM for medium-sized businesses is scalable, customizable, and allows for data sharing amongst teams. As CRM software will offer different levels of service, ones with more advanced features and more users are better for medium-sized businesses that are looking to scale.

For medium-sized businesses, having a central data-sharing point allows for effective collaboration between teams and colleagues, enabling them to have an overview of where the company is at, quickly access customer information, and allow for coordination among the team. Data sharing enables medium-sized organizations to be more organized and efficient by connecting the departments and allowing for overall business growth.

Best CRM For Startups

The main goal of a startup is to scale; in order to do this, the organization needs to have an overview of sales processes with extensive data analysis into what is working and what is not. Customers are the lifeblood of any startup, and as startups are often short on both time and budget, having a solution that helps you target customers effectively while providing insights into what your customers want is essential.

As startups tend to scale quite quickly, one of the crucial aspects of a CRM is effective data organization and management, enabling everyone in the organization, including new hires and freelancers, to quickly and efficiently access important customer deals and past purchases and conversations history.

Conclusion

CRMs are about building and maintaining relationships. The best CRM software for your business will enable you to better understand and support your customers, boost sales while optimizing your team’s processes. When it comes to choosing the right CRM software for you, it is essential that you look at your company’s goals and pick the CRM that has the best tools to help you achieve those goals. While at first sourcing and implementing a CRM tool may seem daunting and time-consuming, the investment will certainly pay off as you find that your team is more efficient, productive, and profitable.

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