09 Apr Challenges of Working without a CRM in an SMB

CRM is a familiar term for all kinds of businesses: large, medium, or small. Anywhere you go, you’ll learn about various types of CRM software available in the market.

So, what’s with this CRM craze that seems to have exploded in recent years? What is the importance of CRM for a small business? Before CRM, how did entrepreneurs manage their businesses?

Well, business owners were certainly able to run their companies successfully before the rise of CRM. But today, with the digital outburst in every field, CRM is a blessing for all. However, it doesn’t mean that this is a magical software that doesn’t have any challenges and it will solve all of your problems or your company will never face another challenge again.

What you need to know is that a CRM solution for SMBs will eliminate a lot of those challenges and may even make it easier for you to solve new challenges as your organization grows.

Not to mention that there are still a few small and midsize businesses that believe in the old way of doing business sans CRM. Without a solid CRM solution, such businesses face a slew of challenges.

Let’s take a look at a couple of the problems they face:

Customer data frenzy

Without CRM, an SMB might have a marketing team, a sales team, and a customer service team with different customer information. In short, the 3 strong pillars of the company, with 3 different sets of data!

It would make so much more sense if all the data was all in one singular pane and all departments could see exactly where each customer was in the pipeline. That’s exactly what a CRM would do.

An invasion of manual updates

An SMB owner might perform certain tasks manually on a regular basis. Such tasks can be easily done through automation with a scalable CRM in place. For instance, a contact form from the website does not have to be entered manually into a database. CRM can minimize human intervention by taking data from that form submission, creating a record, and sending a custom email response.

ROI guesswork

Predicting the returns would be easier and less of a guessing game. It is no longer necessary to sift through pages of documentation and massive volumes of data to determine if a sale was linked to a particular marketing campaign or not. CRM allows users to monitor digital marketing campaigns, connect leads with particular campaigns, and track those leads through the sales/marketing funnel to determine ROI.

Wasting resources

Imagine how much time, effort, and money go into collecting data, particularly if it comes from a variety of internal applications, systems, and external websites like Google Analytics. With CRM and a powerful business intelligence solution, finding all the information in one place would be a blessing. It will enable you to quickly generate and exchange reports in just a few clicks.

Growing pains

This point has been kept at the end because if a company without CRM faces so many challenges that have been mentioned here then where is the time to focus on proper pipeline visibility, marketing, improving product or service, and nurturing leads?

CRM isn’t just a way to keep things in one place so everybody can see and use them. The fact that it saves time is the key reason for its popularity. And, let’s face it, time is money in the business world!

Summing up

This blog should help you understand the challenges SMBs could face for not implementing CRM. If you have already got a great business, you need a support structure to keep it standing.  A strong, scalable CRM will exactly do that for you.