Have you ever thought that you needed a better way to keep track of your customers or clients? Have you heard about CRM systems but not really understood how they could help your business?
If you have a service-based business…
If your business provides a service, then a CRM system can help you in several ways. First, it becomes the single repository for all of the information about your customers or prospects – you and all your employees are keeping notes about emails, phone calls, quotes, deals and everything else in the same place. If you have a sales work flow you can use your CRM to track prospects, leads, and opportunities and do reporting on your sales pipeline. In that one place you can make ticklers to follow up with contacts, create reports on who is calling on whom and keep an eye on your pipeline. You have all the information about the work you’ve done for a customer, making customer support much easier. Having lunch with a prospect you haven’t seen in a while? In your CRM you can look up references to their website, LinkedIn profile or Twitter account. Won’t they be surprised when you are up-to-date on their business and congratulate them on their recent wedding anniversary!
If you are in the retail or hospitality business…
You can keep track of your vendors and suppliers. Create a newsletter and keep track of subscribers. To that list of subscribers you can provide special offers and incentives – and better yet, measure the effectiveness of those offers and incentives. You can create a relationship with your customers and reward their loyalty.
Of course, a CRM system isn’t one thing for one sort of business and something else to another. All businesses can be more effective, efficient and even more profitable by doing a better job of keeping track of customers and contacts. It is a smarter way to do business.
Patti Bunker is the president and founder of Clearly Simple Solutions, a technology advisory firm located in Atlanta, GA. She is an executive with over 25 years of technology experience in corporate America, as a consultant and in commercial software development. She understands both business and technology. Her broad background and varied experience enables her to see easily see the big picture and apply technology creatively to support business goals. Because it is about the business, not the technology. Now she applies that experience to help smaller businesses to benefit from technology. The result is Clearly Simple Solutions.
