The Ultimate Guide to CRMs for Small Businesses

This ultimate guide will help you choose the best CRM for your small business so you can set yourself up for success from day one or day 365!

What is a CRM?

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. Business owners, sales professionals and marketers use CRMs to track their current and potential customer relationships in the lead and sales journey and beyond. 

Many businesses think of a CRM as a technology, but it’s better to think of a CRM as a business strategy to improve your business’ processes and customer relationships. Your CRM is a way to improve dialogue with your customers so you can solve their problems, identify their needs and increase their satisfaction.

CRMs are focused on five main categories: sales, marketing, customer service, field services and ecommerce. It usually houses client contact information, sales pipelines, analytics, lead generation and more. Housing all this information in one, often cloud-based location, allows for higher productivity and increased automation possibilities within the sales, marketing and operations departments. It’s also used as a customer service tool for current customer management. 

Though CRMs have traditionally been used on the sales and marketing side of the business, many CRM companies have expanded their suites to include finance, operations and IT management. Depending on the size of your business, these services could help you transform your internal processes within a centralized system.

Why Use CRMs for Small Businesses?

Not only does a CRM streamline business processes like customer journeys, marketing campaigns and reporting, within a single location, it also helps increase profitability through standardized processes that improve transparency within the business. 

Depending on the size of your business, a CRM can simply be a way to track your leads and current customers in a simplified system, easier to use than a spreadsheet. As your business grows, you can use the same CRM to develop automated business processes to save you time. 

Though it may seem cumbersome at the beginning to use a CRM when you can count your customers on one hand, if you set up and start using this tool early on, you’ll be ready for scaling your business in the future. 

How to Select the Best CRM for Small Businesses

Now that you know what a CRM is and why you should use one, you may be wondering how to select one for your business. It can be overwhelming to choose a CRM because there are so many CRMs out there with an array of tools.

Know what you want and need

Start by thinking about what you need right now and what you will need when your business reaches your 1, 3 and 5 year goals. If you are planning to scale your business considerably, think about the tools you may need or want in the future. Maybe that includes social media management, email marketing automation, inventory management, or ecommerce tools. 

Answer the following questions for your business:

• What do you hope to accomplish by implementing a CRM?
• What’s the main driving force for your need for CRM?
• What problems will a CRM solve for your business?
• What processes can be improved by using a CRM?

With these questions answered, write down a budget for a CRM. This will help you whittle down your list. Now, we have some suggestions depending on your business type and customers. 

CRMs for Small Businesses

As a small business owner, you may not need a CRM that’s designed for large sales and marketing teams. It may be only you and a couple other people handling your business’ back end. You’ll want to select a CRM that is simple yet effective for how you run your business. We’ve compiled our top 5 recommendations for CRM for small business owners. 

We always recommend the following for a small business CRM besides the basic customer contact information and lead management:

1. Sales journey and pipelines
2. Email marketing and automation
3. Social media marketing management
4. Inventory management (for product based businesses)
5. Opportunity creation tools (for service based businesses)
6. Reporting and analytics

CRMs for online businesses and ecommerce

Online businesses that sell products should definitely have a CRM from day one. It’s especially important to use tools that help you build your online presence, ecommerce sites, and email list. With sales and marketing automation tools, you can take your ecommerce business to the next level with the right CRM. 

You’ll want to look for the following for a your ecommerce or online business besides the basic customer contact information:

1. Sales pipeline processes and automation
2. Marketing journey automation
3. Email marketing and automation
4. Inventory management for ecommerce 
5. Reporting and analytics
6. Communication tools like chatbots, phone system, SMS messaging, and social media messaging
7. Social media marketing
8. Optional: Finance management (for sales orders, invoices, and accepting card payments)

CRMs for B2G businesses

If you work with government entities, especially the Department of Defense (DoD), there are specific guidelines you must follow with your CRM. We cover these in more depth in our blog on CRM Considerations and Policies if You Work with Government Agencies. 

These guidelines are to reduce security breaches of government organizations and protect sensitive information. They include limited data access, authorized users, password protection to ensure government compliance and more. 

Do some research on your top CRMs

 

Now that you have some CRMs to choose from, start scheduling demos with their sales people. Before the meetings, write down questions you have for them, including specific problems you are trying to solve, wants and needs you didn’t see listed or answered on their website, and what type of support and training they offer. Learn everything you can about your top CRMs options in these demos. 

How to Get Started with CRMs for Small Businesses

Once you have selected the best CRM for your business, it’s time to get started! Every CRM as well as every business is going to be different during the setup process. If you had a previous CRM or email marketing platform, first you want to export your data from that platform and put it into a way the new CRM can accept. When your data is imported into the new CRM, start making a game plan about how you want to use this new system.

You don’t have to do it all overnight. Start with contacts and slowly move into creating processes for your team. Consider these questions:

• How will your staff enter data? Better yet, who will enter data?
• What automation processes does your business need?
• What tools do you need right away?
• Do you need custom fields that are specific to your industry/customers/internal information?
• Do you want to integrate your website with your CRM to receive information directly in the CRM (i.e. emails, orders)?

And so on. Use these questions to start getting organized about your CRM. It may take some time to get business processes up and running within your CRM, but once they are set up and automated, you will be so happy you did! TIP: If you need someone who knows their way around all this, it might be smart to consider help from a project manager or a virtual assistant.

Final Note: Privacy Issues & Security for CRMs for Small Businesses

It’s important to remember that you are housing individuals private personal information in your CRM. It’s our ethical responsibility to ensure their data is housed in a secure location. We have some recommendations to ensure security of your CRM. 

If you have employees using your CRM, provide them with unique account logins that have high-quality passwords. Educate them on security protocols to ensure the safety of your clients’ data. 

Only use a trusted CRM provider and add multiple layers of security where needed to secure your system from data breaches. Lastly, monitor your CRM activity on a regular basis to spot security breaches and areas for improved security.  

If you are working with government organizations, there are further security guidelines you need to follow. Ensure you are meeting all safety and security requirements of the institutions you are working for.

If you have questions or would like assistance setting up your new CRM, contact CENTIFY for a free consultation.