Developing a
relationship with your customers or clients is imperative to the health of your
business. But that can be a challenge when you have products to develop,
services to execute, your internal team to manage, and vendors to keep track
of. Especially now, when so many of us are working from home or away from our
usual office atmosphere, having the tools to streamline the process of managing
your customers and ensuring that they’re happy and supported is crucial. We’ve
outlined some of the top CRM business tools for the coming year to help you get
2021 started on the right foot.
What is CRM?
CRM, or customer
relationship management refers to the ways in which you and your business
engage with your customers (or potential customers), illustrate how your
product or service can help solve their problems or relieve their pain points,
provide follow-up support or services to those customers, and maintain a strong
relationship with your customers so that you can continue to work with them and
provide the products and services they need.
Considering and
strategizing around the efficiency of your CRM is more than just an
afterthought – it’s key to your business! After all, retaining customers or
clients is the foundation of a successful business. In fact, according to one
2019 study, 84% of customers say that “the experience a company provides is as
important as its products and services.”
What are CRM tools?
CRM tools provide
a simple and time-efficient means of ensuring that the relationship with your
customers is reinforced and maintained. Using these tools means that you can
streamline the work of organizing and communicating with your customers – which
means that you’ll become more efficient and ultimately more helpful to your
customers because you can focus efforts on the actual products and services
that they’ve come to you for!
Some examples of helpful CRM tools include marketing automation tools – such as automated
thank-you emails to customers after they’ve purchased a product from you or
automated reminder emails to customers who’ve abandoned their cart, offering
them a discount code to encourage a purchase. Other examples include tracking
customer behaviour in the ways in which they interact with your social media
posts, for example, and how they move from liking a social media post to browsing
your website to purchasing a product.
Which CRM tools
should I use?
There are a host
of CRM tools available, so it can be challenging to know which are the best fit
for your business and which are worth more investigation. Below we outline what
we think are the best CRM tools for 2021.
1. Zoho
With the same
features as those CRM tools built for massive organizations, Zoho is designed
with small businesses in mind. They offer a monthly subscription service and
flexible plans so that you can update and evolve your CRM as your business
grows. The beauty of Zoho is that you can build the tools you need, specific to
your business. Choose from – or create your own – modules that allow you to
track every step of your customer’s sales journey, follow-up with customers,
and even identify opportunities for upselling. Customer segmentation,
analytics, team collaboration, and lead management are just some of the
features available. You can integrate Zoho with other popular apps and
platforms — like PayPal, MailChimp, Slack, Office 365, Shopify, and Zoom — to
seamlessly build it into your existing workflow and systems.
Zoho’s app lets you track
analytics on the go!
2. Salesforce
This trusted web-based
CRM allows you to track sales and leads, forecast revenues, increase
productivity, and increase sales from greater visibility. Salesforce is
well-known in the industry as one of the leading CRM tools – according to Forbes,
Salesforce grew faster than the CRM market itself from 2017 to 2018 and by 2018
had a 19.5% market share. It continues to dominate the global CRM market for
good reason. Easily integrated with a number of software platforms and
specifically email platforms – like Gmail or Outlook – Salesforce allows you to
automate customer interactions and email marketing seamlessly. One of the great
features of Salesforce is that makes it easy to keep a close eye on analytics,
customer tracking, and customer profile mapping, so that you can better funnel
customers to the right products and services or find new sales opportunities.
Like Zoho, you can customize Salesforce to suit your business’s needs and
goals, which means it works just as well for small businesses as it does for
large corporations.
Salesforce’s
advanced reporting ensures you keep an eye on your customers
3. Less Annoying CRM
As the name suggests, this CRM tool is
built for small businesses with the goal of not only being user friendly but
designed so that you’re not paying for features you don’t need. According to
them, “it’s affordable, easy to understand, and, well, less annoying.” Store
all of your contact information in one place, manage your team’s tasks,
generate lead reports, collaborate with other members of your team, access your
information from any device, and customize your CRM to suit your specific
needs. As your business evolves, you can add or remove modules and fields so
that you’re always working as efficiently as possible. Sync to other platforms
like Mailchimp or Google Calendar, and make sure you don’t miss a thing. Best
of all, it’s designed for those of us who don’t have an extensive background in
tech, so it’s incredibly intuitive and easy to use. Pricing starts at $15 per
month per user, so it’s not going to break the bank to give it a try.
Generate lead reports with
LACRM to quickly and easily prioritize customers
There are plenty of CRM tools available on
the market, but these are three of the best options to try, specifically if
you’re just testing the waters when it comes to CRM. And CRM is not just for
massive retailers or sales firms – even freelancers can benefit from better
tracking of their clients and leads (if you’re a freelancer, check out Bonsai). Whether you’re a
well-established organization or small start-up, there are CRM tools designed
for you to help make your life a little easier.
As always, please get in touch if you have
more questions about how to develop a marketing strategy to better reach your
customers or client base!
Sources:
https://www.iesgp.com/blog/top-5-examples-of-customer-relationship-management-efficiency
https://www.zoho.com/crm/?utm_source=Businessnewsdaily&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=crm
https://www.trustradius.com/crm
https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2019/06/22/salesforce-now-has-over-19-of-the-crm-market/?sh=3c1216ff333a
https://www.salesforce.com/blog/customer-experience/
https://www.lessannoyingcrm.com/