A CRM for small businesses or startups?

It is important to map out your current situation clearly, and to use that to identify why and which CRM system you need.

A CRM system ensures that you can organise everything properly within one system. This covers customer data such as email, phone calls and notes. It can even go a step further, by adding marketing, sales and service data.

In short, this article covers the following:

• Why CRM? Which problems does a CRM system solve?
• Choosing the right CRM system
• Recognise and streamline your sales process
• Setting up your CRM system and organising it

Why CRM? Which problems does a CRM system solve?

As mentioned, a CRM system organises your customer data. Every relationship your company interacts with can be stored within a CRM system. This enriches your customer profiles, allowing you to optimise your processes while also giving personalised attention to your customers.

Your customers provide extremely valuable feedback and generate revenue. They are therefore invaluable to your business. Look after your customers and try to understand them.

The benefits of a CRM for your business can be described in 7 points:

1. Better understanding of the customer, and therefore better service to the customer.
2. Less friction and smoother communication.
3. A first step towards Inbound Marketing, Sales and Service.
4. One central point for customer data.
5. Personalised customer approach.
6. Your sales department can work more efficiently through automations.
7. Gain valuable insights from analytical data and reporting.
   
   

But why would a small business or startup need a CRM system? The above already gives a number of reasons, but for small businesses or startups you could also think of:

• A central point for Sales and Marketing.
• Better alignment between Sales and Marketing.
• Gain insight into the ROI of your Sales and Marketing.
• Improving productivity.
• Mapping out your sales process and partly automating it.
  
  

In short, your CRM system becomes a 'single point of truth' for everyone in your company and connects the various departments within your business.

Choosing the right CRM system

There are quite a few different CRM systems on the market. This makes it a considerable challenge to find the right system for your business. It must not only meet the things you need right now, but also your needs going forward.

• It must be easy to set up, use and scale the CRM system.
• It must be easy to integrate with other applications and systems.
• You must be able to measure what your marketing, sales and service efforts deliver. This can be in the form of ROI and attribution.
• Costs must remain scalable, so that your business and the system can grow together.

Take a critical look at your current requirements beforehand, but be sure not to forget to keep a long term vision alongside this. With these points in mind, you can start looking at the various systems. Consider HubSpot (free CRM module), Salesforce or industry specific CRM systems, and then weigh up the pros and cons for both now and the future.

Recognise and streamline your processes

As a small or newly started business, you will often use various tools such as Google Docs or Excel to document your sales. Often in combination with other tools throughout the entire sales process. That is of course a fine starting point when you are just starting your business, but all the information is now spread across multiple systems or sheets.

You naturally assume that your business will grow over time, and this may well start fairly soon after starting your company. You then start acquiring multiple tools for multiple purposes. Think of scheduling video calls, sending proposals, planning meetings and much more. On top of that, you will also want to keep an eye on your costs and know what your customers deliver. By making this visible, you can not only streamline the process, but also your business. When you go on to hire a new employee with this stack of tools already in place, it will also take quite some time to get them up to speed with all the processes and systems.

HubSpot has written a blog about this themselves called the 'Frankenspot model'. It shows that you can certainly apply inbound marketing, sales and service using different systems. As you can imagine, this is of course not ideal, because it involves a lot of manual work and the data is spread across the tools you use.

Another approach can be to work towards a central system, so that you get off to a good start without it weighing heavily on your costs. The HubSpot CRM system is extremely well suited to small businesses and startups. Are you a startup? Then HubSpot even has a special programme with adjusted rates: https://www.hubspot.com/startups. HubSpot is a pioneer when it comes to Inbound, and has already helped thousands of companies set up cross-channel campaigns, strengthen sales processes and deliver personalised service.

Ultimately, it is all about achieving results. This naturally differs per goal, but think of:

• Sales performance
• More customer-focused teams
• Easy alignment and tracking of contacts and companies
• Tracking the growth of your business
• Marketing performance

Setting up your CRM system and organising it

Setting up a CRM system is a significant process improvement project. It is therefore good to map out your current processes around marketing, sales and service, and break them down into smaller components.

This allows you to implement the CRM system and any other components in the right way, but it is also wise to map out which growth phase you are currently in and what your long term goal is.

By approaching this in the right way, you can determine which things you minimally need in order to adopt a growth strategy that allows you to continuously make improvements within your sales and marketing.

With your CRM system, you can organise the following customer data:

• Contacts
• Companies
• Deals
• Every interaction
• Managing duplicate data
• Pipelines
• Lead scoring
• And more...

During implementation there are a number of things you need to take into account:

Cleaned up data and import
When you start the implementation, you need to have all available data for your current customers or companies on hand. Make sure you have a dataset in which you have deduplicated records and kept only the valuable data. Once you have this, you can import the data into your CRM system.

Positioning statement
When you started your business, you will already have thought about your value proposition. When you describe this as clearly as possible and apply it within your website and marketing, you will be able to convey your message far better to your target audience.

Personas
Identifying the right customers is an extremely important step, particularly within your sales process. Creating personas gives direction to, among others, your sales team when looking for the right prospects.

Sequences and follow-up
Next, you can set up sequences within your system. This ensures that for certain processes, tasks and follow-ups are automatically created and assigned to the right people. It is a kind of 'plan' that your sales people, among others, use to automatically fulfil part of the process and thereby optimise it.

Pipelines and deal stages
A pipeline is intended to monitor your sales process. In a pipeline you see your so-called 'deal stages', for example: In progress, won and lost. You have the option to adjust these yourself.

Reporting
Monitor your performance around the activities you carry out. Think of marketing campaigns, leads, lead growth, etc. By having everything within your CRM system, you get a complete picture of how your business is performing.

Want to know more?

Would you like to know more about implementing a CRM system, or do you have questions about whether this could be something for your business? Feel free to get in touch !