As a small business owner, a CRM can feel like an unnecessary luxury. An expensive tool meant for the big boys with resources to deploy and maintain it. But that is not necessarily true. On the contrary, small businesses are big beneficiaries of CRM. According to E-Squared, 91% of businesses with ten or more employees already have a CRM solution. In other words, even as a small firm, without a CRM, you are most likely not as competitive as you could be.
Contrary to popular opinion, acquiring CRM technology need not be an expensive undertaking for businesses. The right free small business CRM can offer enough functionality to add significant value to your business processes. It can provide you with the core infrastructure packaged with all the necessary features needed to build a solid foundation.
With proper implementation, your free CRM can offer an immediate, measurable impact. The platform can make your business processes more streamlined, resilient, and improve conversions. Here we show you exactly how that can happen. With these five easy facts about free The CRM House, you will have the insight required to transform your small business into a fast-growing venture. However, they can be pretty time-consuming to put together without a price quote template.
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Your free CRM is the ultimate database for all your leads, customers, and deals.
Every business needs to maintain meticulous records if it wants to thrive. This goes for small businesses as well. To efficiently convert sales, you must have maximum visibility into customer data. You need to keep track of all your leads and the status of your relationship with them. Having this data at hand can enable you to strategize and maximize your chances of lead conversion effectively.
Unfortunately, all this data is likely spread across various spreadsheets, files, and email inboxes. That too, if you have been recording them consistently with enough fidelity in the first place. The inconsistent nature of this data means that it is probably not very actionable. If it’s not actionable, your sales and marketing people are working blindly without any evidence-based strategy. That’s not good news for your business as you will have no idea what works, what doesn’t, and why.
An effective free CRM changes all that by providing a centralized hub for all customer information. It streamlines the information-gathering process by eliminating the siloes generated by fragmented tools. Additionally, it can smartly organize all that data in a unified view, allowing anyone to glean all the necessary information. This gives your teams enough context to engage customers in a personalized fashion. They can use the data to tailor custom strategies for each customer, thus driving up closure rates.
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Engage your customers better with integrated chat and telephony.
In the modern sales and marketing landscape, engaging your customers across multiple channels is key to expanding your volume of business quickly. There are traditional tried-and-tested channels such as telephony which is the bread and butter of sales teams. Then you have rapidly emerging channels like chat that allow you to engage with visitors online quickly. It also provides you the means to effectively marshall high volumes of incoming traffic via features such as bots and auto-routing. This helps you with additional pathways of lead generation, which is usually inaccessible for small businesses.
Deploying these channels in a coordinated fashion from a single hub can be a great efficiency booster. A free CRM drastically improves your ability to tap these channels to the greatest extent. It helps you eliminate the need to hunt down different solutions for chat and telephony, pay a small fortune in purchase or subscription costs, or struggle to get them to play nicely with your existing processes.
Not only is this amazingly cost-effective, but it also ensures that these channels will integrate nicely with your CRM software and can be customized to work effectively. Having communications from multiple channels centralized in your CRM also lets you make records dynamically during conversations. Also, you can easily cross-reference them from your CRM’s contacts page for future reference. These optimizations add up, allowing you to provide a more seamless multichannel experience for your customers.
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Collect high-quality data and curate a complete journey for your customers.
A free CRM is a godsend for your marketing teams because it brings a bunch of valuable tools to the table that let you better understand customer needs. This includes tracking page visits, downloads, sign-ups, etc., that help you decode visitors’ behavior. You can use this wealth of information to optimize your website in ways that drive more traffic and garner more conversions. Similarly, you can also track usage metrics for your web app and take the necessary measures to boost adoption rates.
Besides optimizing your customers’ experience, all the data you gather can help you segment your customers into different buckets. You can target these segments with personalized campaigns to nurture their interest in your offering and coax them towards conversion. This can be further expanded into an email campaign to reinforce engagement and provide prospective leads with a compelling value offering. Such nurturing strategies help bolster the number of potential future customers you can keep in the loop. Also, it makes sure that every precious growth opportunity available to your small business is maximized.
Your free CRM can do even more. It gives you a powerful tool that can directly convert visitors into leads – Web forms! You can make your website even more productive by automatically harvesting registrations with web forms connected to your CRM. If you don’t already have one, no worries! Your CRM will help you create and deploy forms from scratch.
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Harness the power of cloud and mobile to make your business more agile.
The number one priority for a small business is to be flexible and keep overhead low. You need to adapt to fast-changing circumstances and make sure you are equipped to handle all sorts of operational contexts. Your foundations also need to be resilient to minimize any potential downtime. A free CRM helps immensely in this regard by opening up options you wouldn’t be able to explore otherwise.
The best modern CRM solutions are cloud-based. This offers multiple advantages. Firstly, you get to sidestep a large chunk of costs associated with running servers and database maintenance. This frees up precious business capital to be allocated to other impactful areas. Secondly, this makes your business location-agnostic. Because cloud software can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection, your teams are no longer tied to their office terminals. That means that they can work from anywhere.
The resiliency advantage accrued cannot be understated in a post-pandemic reality, where the survival of SMBs has depended on their ability to function remotely. In theory, you can have a fully functional business without ever needing to rent out office space. Even in a non-emergency context, the efficiency and cost-benefits offered by such a solution are immense. Top free CRM providers can further bolster this advantage by providing a fully functional mobile app, making your employees even more agile. Having all the necessary functionality in their pockets will result in a manifold productivity boost and practically eliminate any possibility of unwanted downtime.
