How to choose the best CRM system for small business

There is an opinion that CRM is complicated and expensive. Indeed, some programs may not be suitable for small businesses because of the large number of unnecessary functions and high price. How to choose a simple CRM for a small company, so that it will bring benefits and not unnecessary problems?

The main features of CRM for small business

According to the latest data, 65% of companies adopt a CRM within their first five years.

To understand what an effective CRM system for small businesses should be, let’s pay attention to its main goals – it is designed to:

• Create and maintain a unified customer database within one system
• Fix all communications with customers and manage them centrally
• Track the efficiency of each employee
• Collect detailed statistics and analyze the effectiveness of sales for further changes in strategy and tactics.

CRM system used to list the following client information:

1. Contact Data
2. Communication history: calls, messages, meetings and any other details
3. Sales Data: what requests came from the client, what and when was sold (or not sold), at what stage each of the deals was completed
4. Current tasks and their stage of completion
5. Responsible persons.

What kind of business would benefit from a CRM system?

Before we get into the benefits of CRM, it’s worth understanding if it’s a good fit for your company.

You definitely need CRM if:

✔ The company is focused on building long-term relationships with customers.

✔ Sales usually include several stages and a number of contacts with the client, negotiations before a prospect make a decision, different departments and specialists are involved in the process.

✔ The company aims to use advanced sales prospecting tools, to provide efficient sales intelligence, to get quality sales analytics and to collect an active customer database.

With CRM, senior executives will be able to:

• assign tasks in a targeted manner
• monitor the current status and nuances of the progress of each task
• assign and change the responsible employee
• track the fulfillment of key indicators.

Marketers and senior sales managers will be able to:

• view data by various segments and filters
• manage email campaigns
• use sales intelligence tools to analyze sales at each stage, identifying reasons for failed deals and ways to improve sales.

For sales reps who communicate directly with customers, CRM will help minimize routine work:

• perform effective B2B prospecting
• record all details of communication with each client
• automatically add new information (contacts, leads, etc.) without spending time on manual data registration
• change task statuses quickly and easily
• add notes, reminders, keep a calendar and much more.

Benefits of Sales Accelerator as a CRM system for small businesses

Sales Accelerator is a Sales CRM for small business to manage your Lead and Customer database efficiently which is powered by Kompass Data to identify new leads and maintain your accounts updates automatically, making you save a lot of time and speed up your Sales pipeline.

Among the benefits of Sales Accelerator by Kompass:

• Allows you to build the most comprehensive customer database that will always be at your fingertips and updated regularly. You can filter and segment data, sort customers by various criteria and display sales funnel data the way you want.
• The entire amount of information is conveniently organized for viewing. Information can be presented in the form of profiles, graphs, and charts
• Data deduplication is realized due to a well thought-out system. Part of the data is automatically generated. Completed and current sales are always linked to specific clients, they are easy to find and convenient to view.
• You can completely forget about unpleasant cases, when deals were not fully transferred with the departure of some of the employees. Flexible settings of access to information will not allow to ‘steal’ the customer data from the company.
• Does not allow you to forget, miss or lose any nuance, including appointments, contracts, requirements of the senior management and any other moments.
• And most importantly, it maximizes the time to perform routine tasks through extensive automation capabilities, including market B2B segmentation, lead generation, responding to business signals, working with document and email templates, email campaigns, assigning task statuses in one click.

How to choose the best small business CRM?

The most common widespread prejudice that holds back from switching to a CRM is the wrong conclusion that ‘my business hasn’t grown to it yet.’ Indeed, the most hyped CRMs can be quite cumbersome and too expensive for a small company. Large CRM requires effort to understand the complex functionality, to invest in employee training and to perform complex customization. Faced with such a program, small businesses often reject it because they are not interested in paying for features they don’t need actually.

According to business.com, for small businesses using a CRM, 83% saw a positive return on investment (ROI), 61% cited they improved customer retention, and 86% felt the CRM helped achieve business goals. Yet only about a quarter of all small businesses have actually adopted a CRM.

In fact, it is not the company that should adapt to CRM, but CRM – to the company. This is the main criteria for choosing CRM software for small businesses: it should be simple, flexible and functional enough, and at the same time – inexpensive.

What should you pay attention to when choosing CRM for a small company?

All-in-one functionality: CRM should be able to combine operations and integrate services that you use in your work, then there will be less work.

Easy launch and customization: Having a limited budget, it is crucial for small businesses to be able to connect and configure CRM on their own, without applying for expensive services of professionals.

Easy data import: How easily and quickly you can import your customer data into your CRM determines whether you will use it in the future. Therefore, it is very important to choose a CRM that can independently ‘pull up’ all the information on customers.

Ease of use: The interface of the program should be convenient and intuitive, then employees themselves will want to use it. Here again works the basic rule of choosing a CRM for small business: it should simplify the work, not complicate it. A good option – to test for free the service you like during the trial period and assess how convenient it would be to use.

Mobile: More and more communication is taking place via smartphones. Moreover, there are employees who work ‘in the field’ without access to a computer. And when you need to quickly clarify some information while out of the office, the convenience of the mobile version of CRM will be most welcome.

Client Support: a small company often does not have a staff of technical specialists. Therefore, when choosing a CRM small business can use, it is important to make sure that it really provides quality support, which will help to solve emerging issues.

Sales Accelerator by Kompass, a simple and effective CRM system for small businesses, meets all of these criteria.

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