CRM stands for “Customer Relationship Management” and is a software system that helps business owners easily track all communications and nurture relationships with their leads and clients. CRM software for small business replaces the multitude of spreadsheets, databases and apps that many businesses patch together to track client data. The result: organization, efficiency, better time management and impressed clients.
A CRM connects all the data from your sales leads and customers, all in one place. It also consolidates all communications (form fills, calls, emails, text messages and meetings), documents, quotes, purchases and tasks associated with each lead and client. Your entire team can access those details at the right time — to close a sale or deliver outstanding service.
What does a CRM for small business do?
Contact management is the core function of any customer information system, including CRM software. The purpose of a CRM is to store and manage all data for every kind of contact — from leads to business partners.
You might be thinking, “Ok, this sounds kind of like a spreadsheet. What does a CRM do that a spreadsheet can’t?”
Level up with a CRM
A spreadsheet is great if you have under 100 contacts or you’re only tracking static info like name, email address, phone number, company name, website, etc. A spreadsheet can’t compete with a CRM in tracking more complex, dynamic data, like what emails a contact has opened, what pages they’ve visited on your website or their last purchase date. Your CRM is always updating automatically as your leads and customers take actions, while data in a spreadsheet becomes stale the second you stop manually adding to it.
The best CRM software shows how hot or cold a lead really is, thanks to lead scoring. Based on rules you set, points are added to a lead record for important actions your lead takes (like submitting a form or clicking a link), so your sales team can identify the hottest leads to focus on. Lead scoring is next to impossible without a CRM.
What a CRM doesn’t do
CRMs aren’t designed to help with backend operations like production, warehousing, shipping, engineering or finance.
And, of course, CRM tools can't manage what they can't see. So if people work leads or deals outside the system, that lowers its effectiveness for the whole team. Some CRM software is used for data management only. However, an all-in-one CRM system like Keap also offers important features like sales and marketing automation, landing pages, quotes and invoicing to help entrepreneurs manage their entire businesses more efficiently.
Examples of how a CRM works
A good CRM doesn’t stop at collecting information. It helps you harness all of that data to:
- Get personal at scale, sending the right messages at the right times to leads and clients
- Focus sales teams on the hottest prospects
- Shorten the sales cycle
- Monitor, analyze and improve results.
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