CRM & Small Business: Smaller, Faster, Better

CRM and Small Business: Smaller, Faster, Better Chris Bucholtz CRM and Small Business: Smaller, Faster, Better Contents Executive Summary .................................................................................................................3 Introduction ..............................................................................................................................4 Signs That Your Small Business is Ready for CRM...............................................................4 What CRM Means for Small Business ....................................................................................5 The ability to grow without losing intimacy with customers...........................................5 The ability to scale your workforce more slowly than your customer base ..................5 The opportunity to market to customers with the same effectiveness as a large company .....................................................................................................................................5 The foundation for keeping your business information from becoming silo’ed ..........6 Advantages and Disadvantages Small Businesses Have with CRM ................................6 Advantages ................................................................................................................................6 1. Starting with a clean slate ......................................................................................6 2. Already have customer relationships to use as models ...................................6 3. Fewer regulatory issues to limit CRM choices ....................................................7 4. In a better position to grow use of CRM as their company grows ..................7 Disadvantages ...........................................................................................................................7 1. Limited budget .........................................................................................................7 2. Limited manpower ..................................................................................................7 3. Lack of technical expertise ....................................................................................7 Choosing and Implementing CRM Applications ................................................................8 Pushing the Boundaries ..........................................................................................................8 Social CRM ..................................................................................................................................8 Mobile CRM ................................................................................................................................9 Growing Your CRM Operations ............................................................................................10 Conclusion ...............................................................................................................................10 About the Author ...................................................................................................................11 Copyright © 2011 CRM Outsiders and SugarCRM, Inc. All rights reserved. 2 CRM and Small Business: Smaller, Faster, Better This white paper is published by CRM Outsiders, an industry blog on all things CRM and was sponsored by SugarCRM®. Executive Summary Although not every small business is ready for a CRM application, it is easier today for small businesses to find systems that meet their needs and fit within their budgets than it ever has been. The advent of cloud-based CRM applications has eliminated the significant initial budgetary barriers to entry for many businesses, and the proliferation of products geared toward smaller businesses has presented small business with options that allow them to choose based on specific features, quality and cost of support, and extensibility. Small businesses have an advantage in that many of them are already living the discipline of CRM—they’re building and nurturing customer relationships face-to-face today. But as businesses grow—and as they get older—the amount of customer data small businesses must manage becomes greater and greater and eventually requires some technology to manage it. While simple solutions usually come first—ranging from Post-it notes to Excel spreadsheets—this data can’t be shared easily, integrated into other business systems, or provide interactions proactively with the user. CRM can do this—so, when the time is right, it’s important to move to CRM to keep control of this data. CRM can also aid small business in coping with two apparently divergent customer trends— social media and mobile technology. With a CRM strategy in place, social media data can further aid in creating a portrait of the customer. It can also pave the way for increasing use of smart phones to access customer data, both inside and outside the business. 3 Copyright © 2011 CRM Outsiders and SugarCRM, Inc. All rights reserved. CRM and Small Business: Smaller, Faster, Better Introduction Good business owners recognize that relationships are at the heart of every transaction. Every sale he or she makes—whether as the buyer or the seller—represents a relationship. When you break them down, those relationships are based on bits of data—the customer’s name, what the customer bought, how the customer paid, how the customer wanted the item delivered, and so on. For small businesses, with limited numbers of customers and sales of a fairly simple nature, that data set is small enough that it can be stored in the brain of the business owner. Think of the man at the deli counter who knows his clients’ names and their usual orders, or the specialty grocer who can predict what new product will appeal to each of his customers—all the data they need to deliver a great sales experience is stored in their heads. The same is true in business-to-business relationships—if you have a limited number of customers, it’s likely you know the contact at those companies by name, you know their payment terms, you understand their delivery needs, and you remember their buying history with you. You may also have this data in various places within the business—on purchase orders, invoices, phone lists and so on—but the one place that information is tied together is in your brain. Sadly, we have yet to scale the human brain. As your business grows, or as sales and relationships become more complex, the amount of data begins to exceed our capacity to remember it all. The response to this starts simply—perhaps some Post-it notes with important data about a key customer. From there it may evolve into a spreadsheet created on a PC desktop application. As this data is recorded, it can also become fragmented. Where do you store personal data about a customer— like a birthday, or news that his children like soccer, or that she’s an avid fly fishermen—that could help strengthen the relationship later? How do you include calls for service or complaints, and can your spread- sheet record the outcomes of those interactions? If you conduct marketing, how does your spread sheet record whether a customer responded or not? The truth is that spreadsheets can’t do it—they’re too rigid and won’t adapt, and trying to plan for every possible contingency from the start is nearly impossible. The answer is customer relationship management (CRM). CRM is sometimes thought of as a technology, but it’s better understood as a discipline enabled by technology. The object of CRM is to give businesses the best possible understanding of their customer and the customer’s experience with the business. By collecting all this data in a single location, business owners can use it to help with sales, marketing, service and customer loyalty—essentially, it allows them to scale up their ability to know the customer as they did when their busi- ness was very small.