According to Small Business Trends, over 50% of small businesses fail in the first year, and 95% fail within the first five years. Here are some additional stats that may surprise you:
- 40% of small businesses are profitable
- 30% break even
- 30% are constantly losing money
- 9% have a chance of surviving 10 years
So why is Customer Relationship management so important to help your business grow and retain customers? Here are my top 3 reasons:
- Enables you to have 1 place to view all customer information – Do you have your customer lists in excel? Then their order history in paypal and quickbooks? With CRM systems, your business is empowered to look up all relevant interactions, sales, or any data using 1 system. CRM systems are designed to track much of your email marketing, sales, and service information. This enables your business to retain customers by keeping track of what is going on with your customer, while helping you grow by keeping track of all your potential deals with customers in 1 place. As your business moves in to the 5 employee or above threshold, this becomes far more critical in your business. However, even startups with just 1 person without a CRM suffer from growth and retention pains. The average person can only remember 5 deals or things they have to do related to their business at anyone time. Logging into a CRM system helps you to better view and prioritize what deals you should be focused on.
- Improves Trust With your Customers – CRM systems help your business to remind, and follow up on customer issues in sales and in service. Using task management and calendar features integrated and associated to your account or contact list, you can easily empower your employees to be pro active with customer issues. Have 4 open issues related to 1 customer? Log it as 4 distinct cases in CRM, and your service team would be able to fully work all 4 without ever forgetting. All this creates a solid foundation for customer relationships. A CRM tool no longer makes your customers feel like they have been neglected.
- Enables Growth by Offering Customers Relevant Products – A CRM system will allow to segment your customer base, and easily integrate email marketing or marketing automation campaigns to upsell and cross sell products and services to your existing customers. Imagine that you can have automatic emails go out over time to your customers with relevant offers over a period of a month or two. In that period, your sales across the existing customer base increases? This is entirely possible with CRM and Marketing Automation. You do not need to hire sales people to do all your selling. Want to increase the growth of your business? CRM with marketing automation ensures that you engage future prospects with relevant campaigns to get them to purchase. You set this up once, and it does all the work for your business.
As Zappos, CEO, Tony Hsieh says, “Customer Service shouldn’t be a department. It should be an entire company.” CRM is a key tool to help you do that. Small business CRM doesn’t have to be expensive. Check out OpenSourceCRMHosting.Com’s Pro Marketing Automation packages and SuiteCRM Hosting packages to get started today.
