The Power of Small Business CRM Software

Are you tired of storing your customer data in spread sheets, emails and who knows where? Are there other employees interacting with clients and you’d like a way to supervise the activity? Do you feel like things are slowly getting out of control? All is not lost. There’s a solution - Whether you’re a small or a mid-size business owner, having a good CRM software is no longer an option nowadays – that is, if you want to stay in the game.

What makes CRM so powerful?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software helps small and mid-size biz owners to increase their sales and customer satisfaction by sharing the customer information throughout the system.

With CRM software, biz owners are able to predict customer behavior while scaling up their services.

If you’re still not convinced, let’s see exactly what this software can do for your biz:

• Integrity of information: CRM software stores all the data you need at one single place. The data is stored in a consistent and user-friendly way so that everything is at your fingertips whenever you need it.

• Customer – Employee interaction: CRM software automatically keeps track of every interaction between the customers and company representatives. This is good for two reasons. Firstly, you can determine customer behavioral patterns, and secondly, you can estimate employee performance.

• Evaluation of marketing success: With real info at hand, you’re able to track the success of each and every marketing tactic you employed. For example, you can assess how many people were referred to you by being a member of Rainmakers or paid advertising, so you can know what to focus on in the future.

• Tracking the progress of your biz: Finally you can have real data at one place to evaluate the success of your business. This is crucial to business of all sizes. If you don’t have accurate data, how can you know what exactly is going on with your sales and ROI? Tracking the progress is a prerogative to business success.

Thousands of business owners have already embraced this amazing tool and they’re doing much better than before.

What’s your excuse? Do you want to get in control of your own business? Get ahead of the pack and sign up for our Simple CRM software today!

Why Moving to a CRM Can Be a Pain in the Butt

CRM’s promise to make your business life so much easier. Having all of your customer information in one place can really improve your sales and business efficiency, but that information won’t just appear. Whether your information is manually entered or uploaded from a comma separated value (CSV) file, it’s not always easy to get started in your CRM. Here are some cons (and pros) to really starting to use your CRM.

Contact Manager and Data Entry

To start in your CRM, you have to have the patience to enter all of your contacts.  

As mentioned before, there are multiple options for uploading information into your CRM. You may choose to manually enter all of your contacts from your paper and pencil customer management method, or you can upload your information from Excel using a CSV file.

If you have been using the pencil and paper method to keep track of all of your contacts, this can be a very timely process. Opening a business now a days, it is very important that you see the benefits of starting in a simple CRM system early because using technology like this will be beneficial from the start. This will avoid having to manually transfer data. But since there is no going back in time to the beginning of your business without your DeLorean handy, it is important to take the time to transfer this data**. As a note, when adding contacts into your system one must simply add all of the information they know about each contact. Getting yourself into this habit will keep you from having to use your very full memory banks to recall information about these customers later.

CSV files must be properly cleaned and organized before they can be uploaded into a CRM like AddressTwo. This method is riskier due to the nature of transferring data. Before you upload your CSV, you have to clean the file, this is called data cleaning or data scrubbing. Column headers, filled in values, and other important features of this file will affect how well it uploads into the CRM system.

For more on how to add comma separated customer information, click the link to view the AddressTwo tutorial video on uploading CSV data.

Old Habits Die Hard

It’s easy to write up a sticky note to remind yourself to call Frank back, but that isn’t how you’re going to get used to using your CRM. Your CRM will remind you to call Frank next month, but a sticky note can end up in the trashcan before then. Getting yourself into the habit of entering everything you do or need to do into your CRM will help you immensely; these features are called history and tasks in AddressTwo. After a week of forcing yourself to use these features, it will start to come as second nature. Additionally, with AddressTwo as shortcut on your phone's home screen, you can have all of your business reminders and upcoming dates in one place- your CRM.

The Facts

Starting to use a CRM can most certainly be a tedious task, but there are so many benefits to forcing new user repetition. CRM software helps to:

• Increase sales
• Increase leads and quantity of customers
• Monitor and maintain business success
• Improve customer satisfaction
• Improve quality of staff to customer interactions

It is important to get into the habit of using your CRM before you allow yourself to miss another customer opportunity. With small businesses, one opportunity can be all you need to get your business off the ground.

For more on launching into your CRM software, watch this tutorial video with 3 Simple Steps to Just Getting Started with AddressTwo.

Absorb existing contacts into an existing account

To absorb existing contacts into an existing account, go to the account view.
Click the add contact + button. Select 'Or, Absorb existing contact '.

Then select the existing contacts and absorb.