Friday, October 15, 2010

4 Reasons Your Business Should Care About CRM

4 Reasons Why You Should Care About CRM
There are a number of reasons why you may think CRM is something you shouldn't care about. You may think that your business is too small to implement CRM processes and technology. You might also think that you haven’t been in business long enough or that your customer base isn’t large enough to warrant an investment of time and money in implementing a CRM program. However, regardless of the size or age of your business, there are a number of good reasons why your business should consider implementing some form of customer relationship management process. In this blog, I'm going to identify what I consider to be the top 4 reasons why customer relationship management is absolutely something you should care about:

·         Reason #1 – You Can Improve Customer Retention Rates
It’s a well accepted principle in business that it’s cheaper to keep your existing customers than it is to acquire new ones.  A well thought out and appropriately executed CRM program will help you increase customer retention rates.

·         Reason #2 – You Can Increase Revenues
In addition to it being cheaper to keep existing customers than acquire new ones, consider the following - existing customers tend to spend more than new customers. This means that by retaining customers, not only are you keeping your costs down, you're also helping to increase revenues.

 ·         Reason #3 – You Can Control the Cost of Sales
The cost of sales is frequently one of the larger line items on any company’s P&L. As such, you need to be able to both identify the components of your cost of sales and ensure you’re receiving an appropriate return on that expense. What that means in simple terms is, you need to make sure that your sales reps are performing and that your sales and marketing campaigns are providing a positive return.
·         Reason #4 – You Can Improve your Business
Implementing CRM processes helps you to learn more about your business. Not only that, the information you gather about what’s working and what’s not working in your company will help you to make improvements that yield positive results. These improvements may come in the form of a more streamlined customer service process or perhaps might lead to the introduction of a new product or an improvement to an old one. Either way, the knowledge you gain can help you to make changes within your business that will have a positive impact. 
 There are a number of reasons why CRM is important to businesses, and as such, is something that you should consider for your business.However, there are a number of technology options available and the choices can be overwhelming. Not only that, there are very few CRM solutions that were designed specifically for small businesses and so most contain way more functionality than the average small business would ever need. 

In my next article, I'll look at the different technology options available and provide my thoughts on the most important functionality that a small business CRM system should have. 

If you'd like to learn more about how implementing a CRM solution can help your small business, visit www.startercrm.com and sign up for a free 30 day trial. 

 Shaun O'Reilly is Director of Marketing for StarterSuccess - a suite of web-based applications designed to help smaller companies more effectively manage and grow their business. Within this suite, StarterCRM provides small businesses with a cost-effective and easy to use customer relationship management system.

1 comment:

  1. Thank you for the article. In the current economic times, businesses need to depend on tools to make them work smarter – basically we all need to do more with less. There are many tools out there in the market place but one clearly stands out! A software tool that is easy to use – yet has the power to take your business to the next level. You can learn more at http://www.SuradoCRM.com/ondemandcrm

    Anne Miller

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