5 Ways to Optimise Your Small Business

5 Ways To Optimise Your Small Business

All too often, small businesses believe that their customer database is not large enough to warrant anything more than a filing cabinet or an Excel spreadsheet but this can be misconception. In fact, implementing software dedicated to managing customer and order data, known as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software has an array of benefits beyond the obvious.

Centralise Your Customer Data

A CRM system allows a business to benefit from one single point of assembly for customer data. Customer data common to most businesses includes contact details, current and previous quotations or proposals and current or previous orders. If these data elements are stored in discreet locations it is difficult to retrieve information and sharing becomes a problem. Centralising data is the core function of any CRM solution.

Increase Sales And Revenue

Sales teams always benefit from having easy access to all the information the businesses has on a specific customer. A more informed sales person impresses prospective and current customers and may make the difference in a competitive sale. Properly informed sales teams are also able to cross-sell products and services if they know what a customer has previously purchased.

Marketing

There is, of course, the central CRM benefit of automated marketing. If customer data is easy to access and collate, marketing efforts can be all the more effective. Targeted postal, email and telemarketing campaigns become viable and the effort required to launch a campaign is far less than it would be if information had to be collected from discreet sources. CRM systems also provide tools to analyse which marketing campaign is most effective and which types of customers respond to which style of campaign.

Management reports

Many businesses fail to realise this but there is often a wealth of information locked up in their customer and order data. For example, small business owners may know that certain products are more profitable to sell than others. Knowing who buys those products and why and when they do so can be a powerful tool in deciding which product lines to drop, which to keep and how to increase sales of the most profitable ones. CRM software makes it very easy to extract and analyse the data required for these decisions, an exercise which is nearly impossible with traditional filing methods.

Data Backup And Security

Backing up data is of course essential but making backup copies of data stored in different places and in different formats is at best tiresome and at worst incomplete. CRM software makes this far easier by storing the data in one central location. Thus there is only one source of information to backup and many systems have the ability to run automated backups. Losing customer data is a substantial risk, largely mitigated by a properly implemented CRM solution.

There is also the key issue of data security. A business may hold confidential customer data. If this data resides on staff laptops, portable storage devices and in paper files there is a risk that the data may be stolen or misplaced. A central CRM solution, if properly secured, ensures that data is secured and is accessible only to those with the appropriate authority.

This article was written by Workbooks, leading supplier of web-based CRM.