This is the blog transcript of our video “How to Find the Best CRM for Your Small Business”. If you’d like to see more of our videos, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel here.
Last week we talked about what to look for in a CRM. But what should you be looking for when it comes to YOUR business?
Hey everyone, I’m Ian Campbell, CEO of Mission Suite. Before we jump into today’s video, do me a favor and hit the subscribe button and ring the bell so that you’re notified whenever we post new videos.
After 10 years of growing Mission Suite with the vision of making CRM and automation accessible for small and mid sized businesses, I’ve worked with hundreds of business owners and sales teams to help them figure out how to choose the right CRM for them.
But it’s not all support offerings and feature sets. At the end of the day, your CRM has to support the goals of your business. So what should you be looking for in your small business?
Sales Management
Let’s start with the lowest hanging fruit – sales management. This is probably the thing that got you looking into picking a CRM in the first place.
Now when I talk about sales management, I’m talking about more than simply keeping your prospects, clients and customers in one place.
Pretty much any CRM should allow you to create, manage and track opportunities; easily visualize and review your pipeline; forecast sales revenue and track sales activities for individuals and teams. There’s nothing special here and every CRM should be effective in doing all of this.
When making a decision on the CRM you’re going to go with, all you have to do on the sales management front is determine whether or not you can see yourself working with their platform.
If you can, and it fits your needs, you’re good. If not, don’t bother – even if it’s the least expensive option. You’ll end up wasting your money because you won’t use it and you’ll just get frustrated.
As much as this is probably the symptom that brought you to the CRM search, though, I’m betting it’s not the real reason you’re looking for a CRM.
Most people who are looking for a CRM are really looking for a tool to help them grow their business, which means more than just sales management.
And that leads me to my next point.
Lead Generation.
What most people don’t think about when it comes to selecting a CRM for their business is that a CRM can actually help you generate new leads!
Now I’m not just talking about dropping a form onto your website that automatically adds those people to your database, although that is certainly a part of the process.
What I’m talking about with lead generation is also known as inbound marketing. Inbound marketing has taken on a pretty specific meaning in recent years and is most often used in relation to digital marketing efforts, and that’s certainly a part of it but I’m also going to include things like in-person marketing events, coupons and SMS marketing.
To keep it simple, think about everything you do to bring in leads on a regular (or irregular) basis. And I mean everything.
All of these things should be able to send information to your CRM. Everyone who registers for an event, signs up for a deal in your store, or pretty much does anything that indicates they’re interested in your business, service or product offering should be automatically added to your CRM and be able to be followed up on.
What makes you think you need a CRM for your business? Let me know your thoughts in the comments, and while you’re there, give us a like to let us know you got something out of this video!
Automation
I think this is my favorite part of any CRM – it’s ability to automate.
A CRM’s ability to automation your task based sales activities is probably the most consequential aspect of that CRM.
I know that marketing automation and sales automation have become trite buzz words of late but there’s a lot of value to be had in automation in both marketing and sales.
Here are a few ways that I use automation in our CRM to get things done:
When I’m networking, canvassing, cold calling, I can automatically send follow up emails to prospects that I meet. This alone gets me more meetings than I ever did when I was trying to make sure that I was following up with prospects manually.
Automation allows me to stay top of mind by automatically sending out marketing messages to my email nurturing list.
Going back to the point I made earlier about inbound marketing, this allows me to immediately follow up with anyone who reaches out through our website or chat platform.
It will automatically remind me to reach out to a new contact after a set period of time – I don’t even have to set the reminder.
I also use it to onboard new clients and streamline that process, respond to training requests and even ask for referrals
What are you doing every day that you could automate? When I started automating these tasks, I started saving a couple hours a day on average.
Tell me, how much more money you could close in sales if you had two more hours every day to fill the top of the funnel?
And finally email.
Email marketing is something that isn’t necessarily going to come as a part of a lot of CRMs but, if you want to use any sort of automated outreach like follow up emails, you’re going to need some sort of email capability.
There are a growing number of CRMs out there that do have email marketing capabilities built into them and the nice part about that is that a lot of us like to use email to stay top of mind with our prospects and customers.
Having your email marketing platform integrated with your CRM allows you to see if and when those prospects and customers have interacted with your content.
The benefit here is that you can more effectively qualify your leads based on how they’ve interacted with your emails. If someone’s clicking on a link in every email that you send, they’re probably a good candidate for a phone call.
So why can’t you just link your email marketing platform to your CRM? Well you can but integrations aren’t always reliable. If someone changes the password to your email account and forgets to update it in the CRM then your integration breaks and you’re not getting any information.
Keeping it all together is simply more effective and more reliable.
What’s Next?
So those are the key things that you should be looking for when trying to pick the best CRM for your business. We actually created a CRM Decision checklist that will help you as you go through your decision making process.
Click the link below to download our checklist to help you make your decision.
Hey I hope you got something out of this video. And if you did, go ahead and give it a thumbs up and maybe a share so that others can see it too. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to our channel and ring the bell so that you’re notified whenever we post new videos and while you’re at it, check out these videos too!
We’ll see you next time around!