If you’ve set up a new business, perhaps with limited financial resources and manpower, you might not consider customer relationship management (CRM) to be one of your immediate priorities. After all, there’s so much to do to get the company off the ground. You’ve got to think about product and service development, finance, administration, as well as sales and marketing. And if you’re working with a single pair of hands, this can be a fairly daunting prospect.
But it’s important to recognize the value that CRM can add to businesses of all sizes, including start-ups that are trying to get themselves established. These tools can play an important role in your business growth from the outset. In the digital age, when companies can reach out to customers across the globe - not just in their immediate geographical proximity - there is plenty to be gained through effective targeted marketing. There’s a world out there full of sales opportunities, even for the smallest enterprise.
Many start-up businesses struggle to survive their first year, let alone thrive and turn over a profit. In most cases, it’s because they fail to strike a chord with consumers, on one level or another. Sometimes, businesses struggle to identify their true target audience, or at least reach out to the people who should be buying from them. This is where CRM can come into play, by providing the business intelligence that informs decisions.
Efficiency is often the key for startups, given the fact they have limited resources and there are only so many working hours in the day. Using CRM data can help reduce wasted effort in the sales and marketing function, ensuring the company focuses on the leads that are most likely to be profitable in the long term. By profiling consumers and establishing what they are looking for, and how likely they are to become customers, new businesses can play a cleverer game.
Start-ups can’t simply throw their doors open and expect customers to flood in and spend their money. They have to advertise and they have to be clever, using the business intelligence available to them. By utilizing CRM to process, filter and segment consumer data and point towards the best leads, start-ups stand a much greater chance of building solid foundations for growth
