Small Businesses Need CRM Software to Survive the Recession

Customer relationship management software is key to the success of many businesses today. In the current economic climate, the need to attract and maintain customers is even more critical for success. While many companies have been investing in CRM software to leverage the overall benefits of improved customer relationships, this move may slow as budgets get tighter and the pressure to reduce costs heightens.

 

For smaller businesses, who must fight even harder to win and keep customers, CRM software is even more vital. In this economic climate however, many of these businesses may look to cutting their spending on customer relationship management.

 

But, this move, a recent VendorGuru.com article, “Small Business CRM Helps Entrepreneurs Through Recession,” notes, can be detrimental for the small business.

By choosing the right approach to customer relationship management, the article notes, it is possible for young companies today to survive “the bleakest economic environments.”

With CRM applications in place in the small business, not only can sales professionals better target potential customers, but also companies have the power to track interactions with their customers and better understand their purchasing habits.

With CRM software solutions, small businesses can also save time and money spent entering data. This, the article notes, is especially beneficial for the small business who can make use of CRM software from the start of their operations so its entire team makes use of the solution, while larger enterprise implementations of CRM software can cause some friction between users being accustomed to the systems they prefer for entering data.

By placing their core focus on the customer, small businesses are able to succeed in a marketplace that contains customers looking for loyalty and personalized services. In addition, CRM software can help sales and service teams to offer consistent quality services to customers and improve the rate at which they are ordering or making new purchases.

 

A recent survey by Avidian Technologies revealed that small and medium sized businesses are not familiar with the terms CRM and SaaS (News - Alert). According to a report on the study, 70 percent of SMBs said they did not know what CRM meant and only 47 percent said they had heard of it. In addition to these findings, the survey also uncovered that familiarity with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings was even lower, with 74 percent reporting that they knew about the term.

For those companies that said they have already implemented CRM solutions, the survey found they have seen results that exceed their expectations including increased efficiency working with customers, increased sales, improved business insight and increased visibility into the sales pipeline.