What is CRM: An Introduction for SMEs to CRM Tools

In this digitalized era, data comes in abundance, it could be from financials, customers, inventories, or human resources.

It could get complicated and difficult to record, track, and analyze all these data.

That is why customer relationship management (CRM) is a great tool when it comes to managing data that is customer related. This could be very beneficial to your sales, marketing, or customer service teams.

With a CRM tool, these teams will be able to better understand, serve, and support their customers by having better customer data visibility and traceability.

It also helps facilitate and shorten sales processes, thus improving the chances of your teams getting more sales.

The CRM tool is an amazing gift to any business, which is why we can see more Malaysian SMEs across various sectors or industries implementing CRM tools nowadays.

Curious what may arise if you don't have CRM for your business? Read this.

Benefits of A CRM Tool for SMEs

• Better sales and customer management

• Enhance team collaboration

• Effective team management by leaders

• Improve visibility for sales performance monitoring

• Make well-informed business decisions

Better sales and customer management

To hit sales targets consistently, salespeople will first need to be able to identify high-quality leads at a glance, then nurture them well in order to convert.

All these will involve proper sales management.

By having a CRM tool, your sales teams can greatly enhance their sales management process.

Here's why;

CRM provides salespeople with a clear view of lead information thus allowing salespeople to identify quality leads.

Any interactions with the leads will be tracked too, further enabling salespeople to stay informed on any previous conversations during the nurturing stage.

CRM software commonly provides activity scheduling features. With that, salespeople will be notified of what they should do, reducing the risks of missing out on activities such as leads follow-ups or meetings.

Being able to identify quality leads, improve nurturing efforts, and do timely follow-ups, your sales teams' closing rate will vastly improve with CRM.

Enhance team collaboration

CRM serves as a single source of customer information, as well as a platform for internal communication.

What this means is it allows your salespeople to communicate and have discussions effectively through CRM, with all the crucial information available in one single tool.

Reports, customer emails, other salespeople's messages, activities, planned meetings, and more, can all be accessed and viewed.

Tying all these together, the CRM tool can greatly enhance team collaboration if utilized well.

Effective team management by leaders

Handling multiple sales teams is not easy especially when SMEs business grow rapidly during the peak season. Without proper team management, conflicts happen frequently which slow down the task progress.

In order to perform tasks effectively, the team leader has the responsibility for well-handling their team members. The appropriate team management can reduce a lot of unnecessary conflicts within or between the teams.

With the help of CRM tools, team leaders will manage the sales team well. Team leaders can divide the employees into their respective teams based on locations, product and service types, or language to serve specific roles.

So, why such categorization is important in proper team management?

Because each team requires unique sales processes to ensure smooth operation. By using CRM tools, team leaders pre-set the workflow rule for their team to ensure systematic work progress.

In short, CRM aids in proper team management by reducing unnecessary conflict and having an efficient workflow.

Improved visibility for sales performance monitoring

Having good sales and team management is insufficient to define a business's success.

Being able to identify and understand what the team is doing well or poorly is crucial too.

To achieve this, consistent performance monitoring of the sales team is important.

CRM commonly has a feature that allows data integration between CRM and various social media platforms. This allows your sales teams to immediately get timely feedback from customers if they ever leave a comment, feedback, or criticism.

With the automation features of CRM tools, preparing sales reports on a different basis can be very easy. Sales teams can always compare and analyze sales statistics based on different CRM metrics.

From there, salespeople will be able to gain insights into what aspects require enhancement and more effort.

This keeps the sales teams always on track way to the right goal.

Make well-informed business decisions

Business decisions should not be made hastily without proper planning and information.

Having a CRM tool will help reveal data insights to the sales teams with a bow on top. Team leaders will be able to evaluate the sales performance of the team and salesperson accurately with reports generated through CRM.

Through better evaluation of performance and data analysis, businesses will be able to make better decisions with a more data-driven strategy.

CRM adoption statistics 2022

Statistics retrieved from https://thrivemyway.com/crm-stats/

Still struggling to install CRM software? Check out the following statistics to help you understand CRM better and be more confident to implement CRM software!

The sales team can build stronger relationships with customers and increase customer satisfaction rates by 47%.

Communication among the departments also strengthened by 56.9%.

72% of CRM users claimed that CRM aids in accessing customers’ profiles and information. And, this resolves the time-consuming issue by reducing the sales cycle by about 10%.

They also claimed that the accuracy of forecasting has improved by 42% and this drives the increase in employee productivity by 15%.

CRM tool eases our working life, whereas, without a CRM system will put the company, especially SMEs, at risk.

With CRM tools, establishing good management of sales, customer, and teams in business are highly possible. High-quality management increases the accuracy of the decision-making process. The costly mistakes can be avoided as resources are utilized in the most efficient and profitable way.

Are you ready to install CRM software that suits your company or business? Onnet Consulting experts are always ready and happy to guide you from end to end of Odoo CRM implementation.