When many business owners hear the word CRM, they think Salesforce, Hubspot or maybe SugarCRM. They also think expensive, and they think the cost of a CRM is unavoidable. We are living in a time when it is necessary for small businesses to use a CRM to manage prospects and customers. If they don’t, they will lose the business.
The challenge for small businesses is justifying the cost of a CRM. Although this challenge is real and cannot be ignored, justification should not be solely about the cost. You need to consider what you need out of a CRM.
What is it that you need?
As a small business, you need to be able to do the following:
- Create lead generation forms that you can add to your website. When someone fills out the form, they are added to your CRM, and you are notified so you can reach out to them.
- Create email drip campaigns to nurture prospects and customers.
- Automate messages to contacts that are triggered by rules you define in your CRM.
- Automate internal tasks and assignments for your sales team.
- Integrate with cloud storage like Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive
- Set up dashboards for real-time reporting so you can forecast sales, workloads, and other metrics that are crucial to business growth and team collaboration.
These are just a few of the things you need to do to build brand awareness and increase revenue. This sounds like you need to pay a lot of money each month to get these features. If you want to, you can, but there are very good CRMs at an affordable price that gives you this functionality. So, how do you know which CRM to use? As a small business, do you need a CRM on the higher end like Salesforce, or a CRM that is more affordable?
To answer those questions, the CRM that is right for you is the one that helps you achieve your business goals. Achieving business goals is a big deal. It doesn’t matter how much you pay for a CRM. If you can’t configure the CRM so that it is a tool to help you reach your business goals, you are washing money down the drain.
Let’s look at an example. If your goal is to increase the number of new customers who remain loyal through repeat business, you want a CRM that lets you create a sales funnel that walks someone from the moment they become aware of your business to purchasing a product service. However, you do not want to stop there. You want to continue to nurture them as a customer, so they remain loyal through repetitive business.
With this example, the business owner will need a CRM that gives them the tools to create messaging, content, and automated triggers that will help walk the customer through the buyer’s journey and into the customer’s ongoing journey.
If the business owner subscribes to an expensive CRM but cannot create custom drip campaigns based on audience, industry types, and other criteria, the business owner is wasting money and losing opportunities. It would be wise for the business owner to look at other CRMs and see if they have the features needed to reach their business goals.
Conclusion
Just because a CRM has a higher dollar amount for subscription or purchase, it does not mean it is the right CRM. A CRM needs to be a profitable tool instead of a money pit. It needs to be able to help you achieve your business goals instead of fight against you.
X2CRM is an affordable CRM that we can configure based on your business goals. We take configuration seriously which is why we talk with you about your goals before we start the implementation. Once X2CRM is implemented, we train you to use it, so you are ready to go full speed one day towards reaching your goals. If you would like to learn more about X2CRM, contact us at 301-332-0613 or fill out the form to schedule a free demo.
