Why startups should invest in CRM?

You are a budding entrepreneur and your start-up is just gearing up to take on the market. Obviously, though, you are stretching thin on the financial aspect, and you don’t think you have the capacity to invest in a new tool that’d help your company grow. 

You are already aware that a CRM would be the viable option to invest in for the growth of your start-up, but you aren’t sure how it’ll be beneficial to you, especially at such an early stage of your business. 

To understand how a CRM can help your business, you first need to understand what a CRM platform is. 

How does a CRM help you grow your start-up? 

Customer Relationship Management software is a big-picture approach to your company’s relationships. Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Recruiting and Public Relations, all of these departments that depend on building and nurturing relationships need a tool like CRM.  

CRM lets start-ups like yours stay organized and get more customers in order to grow your business with time. Seeing it as an expense is quite obvious for you, since you are just starting out, however, there are many reasons why you should understand why a CRM is an investment rather than being an expense. 

Here’s how a CRM helps you grow your start-up- 

1. Helps you collect leads coming from different sources 

Start-ups collect leads from many sources like websites, tradeshows, social media, email campaigns, cold calls, references for their revenue cycle. 

CRM helps them fetch these leads from different sources and store them in a centralized platform, so that your sales team can take the next step by identifying the potential leads and assigning them to the right sales rep. 

By knowing which stage a particular lead is on, sales reps can then move those leads up the sales funnel and close more deals without much hassle. Similarly, sales reps can monitor lead details, queries, and every communication held with them. 

With the help of a CRM, start-ups cannot only fetch data but also identify the most promising lead generation source. 

2. Make you identify the lapse in the sales process and help you streamline it 

Not everything can be done by your sales team on their own. No matter how much they try, some detail or the other will always escape the eyes of your team. 

Your team might fail to follow-up on an old lead, or miss on contextual information to engage the end customer- a CRM lets you see all of it on a centralized dashboard so your team identifies the lapse in the sales process and streamline it with the help of automation or even manual intervention. 

The team might be facing troubles that hold them back from doing their best. Bottlenecks may arise when your team chases the wrong customers, or neglect the right ones at the right time, delays in-process activities, and letting go of upselling and cross-selling opportunities once the sale has been completed. 

With a CRM, your team can easily visualize every step of the sales processes, clear all the bottlenecks, and sell better! 

3. Helps you discover new sales opportunities 

Tracking your team’s sales activities is vital to know which product, region, or channel is driving most of your sales. With these details, it becomes easier to plan future sales campaigns and discover sales trends and opportunities. 

Using customer engagement data and identifying new selling opportunities is essential in order to sell more and faster. Customer behavior data is your best tool to identify selling opportunities, and tracking their activities can give you an edge over your competitors.  

With the help of email click and open rates, landing page submissions on websites, web tracking and transaction history, brand mentions over social media, and more, you can easily keep track of your prospects’ activities and know what interests them. 

CRM helps you do-it-all and even allows you to build a rapport with the customers so that it becomes easier to find upsell and cross-sell opportunities and make your move right on time! 

A CRM lets you track every sales activity and infuses mobility to every sales process. 

4. Cut down on manual work 

Your team cannot do it all on their own. Manual labor is nothing but a distraction from selling for your team.  

Automating all the sales processes helps your team to overcome the challenges of the manual busywork and lets them focus on what they do best- sell. 

Since every minute detail is important for the sales reps, CRM manages all of them in a single place, keeps track of each activity, saves every client communication, so as to make it effortless for the sales reps to understand the client’s history with the company.  

Similarly, by automating follow-up emails and text messages, your team can save their precious time on generating new leads and closing more deals in a shorter span of time. 

As for you, it becomes easier to assign new leads to the team since the CRM automates that process for you, while you can keep a tab on every automated activity that your team does. 

5. Leverage on the existing workforce 

As a start-up, it’s not advisable to spend more money on resources, however, it’s better you make the most out of the already existing workforce. 

A CRM lets you keep a tight check on who’s doing what, so that your team keeps performing their best without wasting any of your precious time. 

By investing in a CRM, you not only save your money, but also leverage the full potential of your entire workforce. 

6. Make your sales process efficient 

Say your team’s conducting a product demo or sending outreach mails, but they don’t have much information about the client. You wouldn’t want that to happen, would you? 

With the help of a CRM, your sales team can refer to the previous conversations before approaching the client, customize the client contacts into various logical groups, tailor their follow-ups, automatically schedule reminders, and even evaluate the new customers and opportunities to upsell and cross-sell. 

 Your team can set up customer lifecycle email campaigns and educate clients on every stage of their interaction in order to help them get maximum value from your product. 

7. Boost team collaboration 

Team collaboration is vital to their selling efficiency. With features like Shared Inbox, you can automatically assign a conversation to the right team member, add mentions to take help of the other team and resolve queries in no time. 

With the help of a CRM, your team can always stay on the same page as everyone else and work seamlessly without wasting any time on unstructured interactions. 

8. Set more meaningful goals and even track them 

As a new start-up owner, you must have a lot of set goals in mind already, like your revenue goals for the next year, creative goals, or financial milestones to reach for- there’s always something new looking you into face once you reach one goal. 

Be it expansion of business or receiving funds from an external source, you always want to set realistic milestones to complete. However, it’s not always easy to set mindful goals in the beginning. Setting ambitious goals is one key towards reaching the new heights that you wish to touch; think big and take steps towards it along with your entire team. 

With a CRM, you can set attainable goals for your entire team and even track them from time to time, so that you are always aware of which team member is performing well and who needs to be given a push in order to meet their quota. 

9. Important integrations 

As an entrepreneur you are already aware that one platform cannot provide you  with everything. However, a CRM that allows third-party integrations is a platform that fits all your requirements the best! 

For example, with google calendar integration, you can synchronize every agenda, meeting, call and other schedule in your CRM. 

Have a Start-up? Get a CRM, Now! 

Start-ups can be from different industries, and your sales processes might be different from the others, but your need to grow revenue is never going to change. Having a system that provides you with all the necessary tools can be beneficial in the long run, since it improves productivity of your team and in turn, generates more revenue.