Article Contributed by Finn Pierson
When many entrepreneurs decide to go into business for themselves, most never dream about how many hats they are required to wear and how many different sources of information that they will need to manage in both their macro and micro-environments. As an entrepreneur, as you begin to interact with more and more people, generate more sales, and have more sales leads in your sales funnel, you will need to manage not only the processes but also all of the different people that you interact with. Although this may seem very daunting, especially if the number of people you interact with is beginning to grow, then there’s no better way for you to manage them all than with a Customer Relation Management software, known as CRM.
There are immeasurable benefits from using a CRM software program. For example, according to Forbes Magazine business owners have experienced an increase in sales by 29% as a result of using some form of CRM. However, it’s most impactful the correct data is maintained and updated regularly. If you are a small business owner or entrepreneur and are interested in better streamlining the management of your contacts, below are some reasons why you should make a CRM program your next entrepreneurial investment.
- Managing Your Contacts
First and foremost, if you are new to CRM, you may not realize how many people you interact with on a daily, monthly or an annual basis. Since you likely have many people contacting you from a wide variety of different sources, who also serve many different roles, these individuals must be managed to ensure your company’s success. From email management to sales activity, to keeping up with birthdays or the birth of a vendor’s child, your relationship with all the people you come in contact with is probably one of the most sensitive areas that you can manage. And since businesses are built on relationships, it’s very critical to properly manage them.
- Tracking Your Customers
Each of your customers is unique. They have different buying and spending patterns based on wide variety of different factors. In order to manage this process and better determine what they are buying, how frequently they are making purchases, and how much they’re spending on a particular item, it’s important to have a great tracking system in place to not only track these areas but to also track customized experiences that each of your customers may have.
- Target Marketing and Market Segmentation
Of all the customers that you interact with, they make up your general target market. However, some of them make up smaller groups known as your market segment or in some instances, your market niche. In order to implement effective relationship marketing plans, having appropriate software in place that manages these groups will help you develop more streamlined, better-targeted marketing strategies.
- Social Media-based Integrations
Social media is exceptionally prevalent in today’s society. Therefore, social media management based integration software programs can be better streamlined with the integration of various social media platforms. This will make tracking all of the ads and responses to those ads a lot easier than you could without having some form of CRM and tracking integration software in place.
- Customer Feedback
Managing your customer’s feedback is a very critical part of running a business. When customers reach out to businesses online, if they are neglected, many of them may move on to your competitor. To reduce such occurrences, the use of the proper software to better streamline customer feedback is also an excellent investment for entrepreneurs.
There is such a wide variety of areas that the entrepreneur needs to oversee and manage; including additional areas such as document management, task management, mobility management, sales tracking and more. Essentially, entrepreneurs need to track pretty much everything. As your business grows, so should your CRM and related software programs. It should be seen by entrepreneurs as their greatest next business investment to manage their contacts and their overall growth.