Does Your Businesses Need A CRM? The Benefits So You Can Decide.

When you start out, there are a million things to think about as you build your business. Getting your products or services right, building a website, putting together a marketing strategy, perhaps even hiring your first employee. 

So with all of these tasks, it's easy to forget some of the most important parts of running a company, like having a simple, safe CRM. 

CRM stands for 'customer relationship management' software, and it's used to store and track your customers, including prospects and even your cold call list. Without a CRM, your customer data is likely in the bronze age of email and Excel spreadsheets, a dangerous place to be as your business grows. So let's look at what a CRM is and how it works, and why small businesses use CRM's in the first place.

What does a CRM do?

All CRM's have one common feature: Storing your clients and prospects’ contact information like their name, company, email address and phone number. You can also store info like birthdays and major events, which are all tied to a specific customer - something you can't easily do in a calendar for example. 

Your CRM can also group multiple contacts from one company in one place, which can save your butt if you're on the phone with a client and forget who their colleagues are. With a CRM this information is all laid out for you!

How does a CRM help boost your sales?

When it comes to sales, ease and efficiency play a vital role. If you're wasting time searching through your inbox or rows and rows of a spreadsheet for a client's details, you may already be behind. Email is also unreliable, as email is not designed to be a filing system or a sales system. 

You can use your CRM to quickly view your leads and sales pipeline, without needing to search or dig around. On top of that, your CRM will let you filter your opportunities so you're not wasting time on cold leads.

A CRM is perfect for smaller businesses with a few team members.

Aside from helping solo business owners and micro businesses, a CRM also improves the communication between a larger team. The simplest case is that one of your team members can quickly see if you've worked with a client before, and any notes about them. Beautiful. If you're using an Excel spreadsheet to manage your prospects, we would highly recommend trying a CRM for coworking!

A CRM is the backbone of your inbound, and outbound marketing.

You might be thinking, jeez guys, I've spent hours on my Excel spreadsheet and it's a masterpiece. Consider this, how do work between your spreadsheet and your email marketing? Is it a manual process? Do you log each email you send in your spreadsheet?

With the inboundio's CRM, you can send an email newsletter in minutes to a single client, or all of your clients with just a few clicks in your CRM. Email marketing can go one step further too, you can also set-up what's called a 'drip email' or 'nurture email' sequence to send your chosen clients an email automatically every X days (the intervals you choose). So it's not just a monthly email newsletter then you can send, but also a series of newsletters to help you close new leads, and keep previous clients coming back for more! 

Using a CRM with your Landing Pages.

Here's where the beauty of a CRM comes into play, you can automatically capture leads from your Landing Pages, directly into your CRM! That means that when you're running a paid advertising campaign (like AdWords), you can put it on autopilot from the get-go. 

Security is paramount.

One thing that seems to happen quite a lot is that Excel spreadsheets get corrupt, written over or lost in the Excel bowels of complication. And when you have your most important data in this spreadsheet (your clients), that can be disastrous.

With a CRM, your customer information is central, secure and backed-up. You can even import your spreadsheet into inboundio with a few clicks. To import contacts simply log into inboundio and:

1. Navigate to the "Contacts & Leads" area from the left-hand menu.
2. Download the sample file provided in the "Import Contact CSV" area.
3. File the sample file with as much information as possible for each contact.
4. When ready, Select the file in the "Import Contact CSV" area.
5. Click the "Import Contact" button.

Yes, and inboundio is even easier as it's designed for smaller businesses, not massive sales teams working across multiple countries. These CRMs can be very complicated and overwhelming with hundreds of features most small businesses would never use. 

We'd recommend trying the inboundio CRM for yourself and let us know what you think. Simply sign-up for inboundio here www.inboundio.com and start backing up, better organising and making more sales from your contact list today.