How To Select The Best Small Business CRM For Your Startup’s Business Growth

Selecting an efficient and best small business CRM platform has become more difficult over the last few years, as several CRM for small and medium businesses vendors have upped their game, and has thereby made the playing field more level than ever before.

Now, if you are still at a loss in understanding what is CRM software, here is your answer is a gist:

What is CRM software?

Customer Relationship Management or CRM means a mishmash of business strategies, software and business processes that aids in building long-standing relationships between organizations and their consumers. 

While healthy competition ultimately benefits the consumers, nevertheless those tasked with selecting the right best small business CRM solution for their organization, the selection process by signing up for free trials and by rounding up leading vendors of CRM for securing demonstration, can take a lot more time than you practically want it to be.

Now, as there is always a hidden cost involved in an extended selection timeline, and choosing the wrong CRM can result in substantial multi-year expenditure with little returns, here are five steps to accelerate your best small business CRM selection process.

1. Interview End Users and Stakeholders

Now that you know what is CRM software, the primary thing you need for a successful CRM selection is to address the requirements of both the management and the end-users of your easy to use CRM platform. 

Especially inputs from the would-be end users of the software solution is highly valuable for the selection process since when the right type of questions are asked, areas of customer dissatisfaction and operational inefficiencies will often emerge, which the management may not have even been aware of. 

Moreover, when the ends users feel that they have are a part of the easy to use CRM software’s purchasing process, they will naturally be even more willing to participate in using the tool, once the solution is rolled out. 

2. Assemble and Analyze Input

Once the information from the end-users and the management staff has been gathered, you need to organize and analyze the user inputs in reasonable detail. 

Additionally, relevant details about the existing systems in your organization, ranging from shared spreadsheets to ERP systems (if any) and how these solutions are currently working or not, should also be a part of the analysis. 

Since, the output of this step, once you are aware of what is CRM, will become an integral part of the next step.

3. Develop a Vendor Ranking System

After prioritizing the list of all the requirements, this information should be organized in a manner that the participant of the best small business CRM selection process can rank the CRM vendors on their abilities to meet the documented needs.

Moreover documenting the requirements of your organization also helps the CRM vendors to address the highest priority requirements first and the rest in a logical sequence of the data.

4. Select the Easy to Use CRM Solution

After the demonstrations by the CRM vendors, now that you know what is CRM software all about, there will inevitably be follow up questions for the CRM vendors regarding specific functionalities and deliverables of their CRM software platforms. 

Remember to consolidate all the participating CRM vendors’ rankings in a single document, so that they can be further scrutinized easily in case of a close call.

Additionally, as a part of this step, ask for the implementation timeline from the selected CRM vendors at this stage, which will help the management of your organization to find a solid basis for their initial estimates of implementing the solution in your company. 

5. Negotiate and Procure

Once you have finalized on the chosen easy to use CRM vendor, there are additional works now, which needs to be done. For example, the CRM chosen by you may have several editions, so the vendor of the CRM may allow you to mix, and match functionality licenses within your CRM edition, to tailor the solution as per your company’s needs. 

It is best and it also makes financial sense to purchase a limited number of user licenses for all departments in your organization, during the roll-out and then purchase additional licenses in the near future once all the departments in your organization get well adapted in using the software. 

Also, check the contact duration before rolling out your CRM, be it Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM platforms (mostly used by several small businesses and startups) which should be determined at this stage.

Takeaway

Now that you know what is CRM, as a parting note can we assure you that a formal process for choosing the best small and medium business CRM software solution help a lot than just randomly buying the CRM software. Since this perspective that you will gain about your business by gathering this valuable information can be used also as inputs for planning and strategic thinking for the further growth of your business.  

Three Most Basic Lead Scoring Techniques For Small Businesses And Startups

The importance of leads lies in the fact that in order to make effective sales in any organization, you must have qualified leads. Lead generation is the process by which you can establish interest in services and products among the people in a targeted market for business growth .

There are more than a few steps in generating leads, just as there are quite a few ways for lead tracking to find the right people who need what you are offering. However, most lead generation technique requires businesses to buy CRM to achieve some level of lead nurturing by which marketing and sales teams can make a lead into a prospect and then a customer of your brand.

Hence for lead tracking and lead nurturing most of the organizations, those who have adopted 

easy to use CRM software for lead management use lead scoring techniques for measuring how likely a person is expected to get converted into a customer, based on their individual characteristics.

For lead scoring, individual scores of the leads are indicated by the information they provide to a business via conversation or forms and their behaviors like interactions with your website or emails.

It must be remembered that not all collected leads by any business are equally interesting and so not all leads become your customers, as most of them, you shall find is not ready to buy.

According to a Research by MarketingSherpa, whenever any new contact is added to a 

CRM database , just only 27 percent of those leads will qualify to the point where they will be ready to get engaged with sales. Hence, the rest 73percent of the leads must be nurtured and qualified.

Here are some of the key lead scoring techniques that have worked for many:

Technique # 1

Increase The Lead Score Based On Interactions

It is considered that people are having a high interest in your product or services once they read several emails or download multiple white papers from your website.

Here is a view of an incremental lead scoring system based on the lead’s interaction with your brand:

• +1 point- Lead visited your website
• +5 points- Lead clicked on your email 
• +10 points- Lead downloaded your free guide
• +20 points- Lead completed your free capability assessment
• +30 points- Lead viewed contents meant for the paid members
• +40 points- Lead viewed your payment form

Technique # 2

Diminish Lead Score As Per Interest Level

Although many organizations believe in only increasing lead scores, nevertheless it is also another best practice to decrease lead scores if the prospect has not interacted for a long time.

Therefore, once a prospect or a lead has not interacted for more than 30 days, you can decrease the prospect’s lead score by 10 points. However, once the prospect re-engages again, you can increase the lead score based on their current interactions with your brand.

Technique#  3

Increase Lead Score Based On Disclosed Preference

Finally, this is just like scoring a lead by asking the prospects questions to know them better. Once you know when the prospect may become your customer, by asking direct questions while lead tracking like “are you willing to buy within the next 1 month or in the next 3-6 months?” you can grade the lead accordingly.

Conclusion

Now that you know the importance of leads, you can also change the threshold scores of the leads while doing the lead scoring, once you buy CRM as a business growth technology and tool if you want to develop the lead generation technique which suits the best for your business.