Why your small business needs a SaaS CRM solution

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

By Michael Deane

Every small business needs all the help it can get, and that includes different tools and platforms that will allow your sales and marketing teams to do their job properly.

The competition is increasingly fierce no matter what industry you’re in, and it’s hard to attract, impress, and keep customers. All this requires you to improve the quality of your customer service and make every single interaction with your customers successful.

If you want to see results and offer your sales reps assistance when it comes to hitting their quota, then you should start by investing in a SaaS CRM solution.

What is a SaaS CRM solution?

The acronym SaaS stands for software as a service, while the abbreviation CRM refers to customer relationship management.

What this means, in reality, is a cloud-based system with which your business will be able to manage individual relationships with your customers throughout the sales cycle. This way, you’ll have all the information about your customers and your interactions with them in one place. A CRM can boost your productivity, save you a lot of time, cut your costs, and even help you predict your sales.

As for the cloud-based part of the equation, the fact that your CRM runs in the cloud means that it’s not installed or stored on your company’s servers. As a result, you and your team members will have 24/7 access to your CRM solution, no matter where you are, there are no maintenance costs, and you won’t have to worry about security issues.

A recent survey has shown that companies using CRM generate an ROI of almost $9 for every dollar they spent.

Here are some reasons why you should switch to a SaaS CRM solution.

Streamline your sales process

One of the most important advantages of using a SaaS CRM solution is that this powerful tool assists your sales representatives across the entire sales process. In other words, it will streamline customer management all the way from lead generation to customer acquisition, and subsequent sales opportunities.

Your sales team will have all the information they need in order to reach out to every single prospect and personalize the communication.

Apart from storing valuable customer data such as

-their previous orders,

-emails and calls exchanged with them,

-all potential customer service issues,

You can also include their social media activity so that you can see what they like or share on their profiles, as well as what they say about your company or your competitors.

Improve the customer experience

Stats say that customer experience will overcome product and price as the key brand differentiator by the end of 2020.

Responding to your customers’ questions in a timely manner plays an important role in their overall experience with your company.

Given that you can never have enough support agents to cover all the calls, one solution is to implement call deflection bots to redirect queries to chatbots capable of handling multiple conversations at the same time and being available 24/7. These intelligent algorithms will help your customers solve some minor issues and answer their product-related questions in a natural, engaging, and conversational manner – so, no more canned, robotic responses.

Centralize customer information

By keeping all your customer information under the same roof, all your team members will be able to access and update it easily.

A CRM will keep all your data organized, meaning that your sales and support agent can find everything they’re looking for in order to have successful interactions with customers right away, without having to go through papers or files on their computers.

This centralization is also crucial because it allows your team members to work remotely – all they need is an internet connection, and they can log into their CRM dashboard.

SaaS CRM solutions offer an additional layer of security because you’re dealing with some sensitive customer information that needs to be properly protected. Keeping your customer files in paper or stored on a physical device or your own server is risky these days.

And this doesn’t refer only to cyber attacks that could do substantial damage to your business, but also to other incidents, such as data loss. Cloud-based CRMs offer regular data back-ups of your data and allow for disaster recovery.

Eliminate paperwork and save time

Instead of wasting their time on spreadsheets, planers, and other documents, your sales agents can actually focus on selling and providing a stellar customer experience.

As CRMs are automation tools, they are capable of identifying promising leads that are more likely to make a purchase. This forecasting possibility is another important time-saving feature, as your sales and customer support teams won’t have to rely on guesswork.

In addition to that, this indispensable tool will also remind your sales and support agents to follow up and keep in touch with customers at regular intervals, even after the purchase. This way, you can ensure a successful post-purchase journey, product adoption, and onboarding, all of which are crucial for customer satisfaction and retention.

It’s obvious that every small business can greatly benefit from implementing a SaaS CRM solution in terms of productivity, efficiency, and improved customer experience.

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Michael Deane has been working in marketing for almost a decade and has worked with a huge range of clients, which has made him knowledgeable on many different subjects. He has recently rediscovered a passion for writing and hopes to make it a daily habit. You can read more of Michael’s work at Qeedle.

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