Finally ditching that 9-5 job? Got the courage to turn your passion into your profession? Found a niche? Well, congratulations on your business startup. That’s the easy part. If this is your first venture as an entrepreneur, you must know you have lots of storms to survive before you reap the benefits of not being an employee. ne of those storms is learning about CRM systems.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are one of the popular tools in business nowadays. It can help you with lead management, streamlining processes, and even sales forecasting. However, you can still run your business without it.
The primary concern of CRM is budget. You usually have to pay $10 per month for each CRM seat. If you are not fully using the system, you are not getting the full ROI. Moreover, it’s not just the monthly fees as there are also implementation and integration fees. You must also account for the training fees and man-hours spent by the person who would use it.
Additionally, automating processes can make your customers feel that they are numbers for you. It lessens the personal touch. Those automated emails are sometimes too generalized that it fails to address the actual concern of your customers.
Here are some tips on how to manage without investing time and money in CRM for startups:
Collaboration is the Key
Create a centralized directory of your leads and clients. Having a shared contact list helps your team collaborate more efficiently. In this manner, each team member does not need to enter the same customer contact information in their own directory.
Take a look at this scenario. The marketing person collected hundreds of lead email addresses. He input it once into the database. Eventually, the sales rep who would do the follow-up emails will have to copy/paste all those email addresses. However, if all your team members share a contact list, the sales rep would have all those email addresses appear in autocomplete on the recipient field of his messaging app.
Moreover, everyone who has interacted with a client should put important notes that may lead to the closing of the sale. Google Contacts have this feature already. Maximize what you already have. Also, fill in all the fields as much as possible like company, job title, and website. This would be the form of your contact management.
Tap Your Network and Your Network’s Network
Who should support you in your endeavors better than your family and friends right? Tapping your relatives and acquaintances would be an easy task if you’re not the black sheep of the family. If you are the black sheep, that’s another story.
They may ask for insane discounts or worse, get the product/service for free at all. You may consider giving in to their demands with the condition that they can recommend it to their friends as well. Let your immediate network be the initial feasibility study of the viability of your product or service. That is if they are your target market.
Even if they’re not the target market, ask them for contacts who may suit your audience. You can also check out your dusted yearbook to recall who else is not connected to your social media account. This will be your equivalent to the lead generation of CRM.
Layout Your Plans
Set achievable goals first. Clearly define your periodic target reach and regularly check if you are attaining them. Your trusty spreadsheet can help you with this.
Feel the market well before making additional investments. Learning about strategic planning tools will help you scale wisely to avoid burnout. Doing this without CRM will help you understand the business better. When the time comes that you are ready to subscribe to a CRM system, you can check its effectiveness rather than blindly trust it.
Establish Your Process
Business is not just about the product. If you didn’t take a business course, you would have to learn it in the school of hard knocks. Fortunately, this is the age of information. You learn not only from your experience but as well from the thousands of blogs of other young entrepreneurs sharing their startup journeys.
However, each business has unique challenges. Therefore, you cannot simply copy from another their steps to success. You may follow other successful enterprises but it would still be different variables. You have to create all your business processes to tailor-fit your brand.
Maximize Your Google Workspace
You can use Google Workspace as your CRM. If you already have availed it for your customized email address, you should explore how to fully reap the benefits of this program.
For example, you can look at all the interactions you have with a client at a glance as you check Google Contacts. This will give you insight about your customer that may help you either formulate a better approach to close the deal or provide loyalty perks as he is already a long-standing customer.
You can also create folders to sort your contacts. Organize your contact database into categories like leads, prospects, customers, patrons, etc. In this manner, you can have a template approach for each specific group of contacts.
Furthermore, you can utilize the Google Drive folders to compile the documents like purchase orders and invoices of your customer. Google Calendar can be accessed from your inbox so setting meetings can be a breeze.
Conclusion:
Starting a business is a demanding journey. It is reasonable to find all the tools you need to make it easier. CRM is one of those tools. But if implementing CRM will add more stress, you have other options that will help you do without it. This gives you time to find the right CRM that would meet your company’s needs. It saves you from hastily investing in a CRM that you may eventually regret.
