Cloud based CRM: Does your small business need it?

I ran into a woman I had done business with a while back who heads a successful Interior Design firm that manages both residential and commercial accounts. She has become a faithful reader of our blog and told me that although she has learned a lot about cloud computing, she doesn't think that they needed more than what they had in place and that the cost and time of implementing cloud services would not be worth the supposed benefits. At first I thought it was an odd comment as she is already using some cloud applications and she is not one to shy away from technology. She explained that every time her staff was introduced to yet another 'time saving' tool, the learning curve was far beyond what had been expected and, all too often, was quickly discarded. She said that is was just easier to use what they had in place. Sound familiar?

I was increasingly curious and asked her what email and CRM program they were using to manage their accounts. Her firm uses Gmail, uses Excel to manage their contacts and schedules along with a design project management program that manages the product and purchasing side of their business.

This firm has 10 employees and for any individual project can be employing multiple vendors. How can a web-based CRM program benefit their business?

Liz, this is for you.

Customer relationship management (CRM) has been around since the beginning of time. The shopkeeper, the door-to-door salesperson and the repairman practiced it automatically, serving their customers one-on-one and adjusting relationships on the fly. CRM wasn't very complicated back then.

Today small businesses typically fall into two categories, each which carries its own challenge: some have many widely dispersed customers where maintaining relationships is a serious challenge, others rely on a small pool of customers for the bulk of their business. A design business, actually most service businesses fall into the latter category although both would benefit from implementing CRM tools.

There is an absolute need among small businesses, particularly as they grow to 10 or more employees, to have the ability to not only manage centralized customer information, but to share and collaborate on that information across the organization and on the road. A company may be small, but its need to service customers from across the country and abroad or to access centralized information remotely is imperative. Yet even a company of two to four people will find it essential that project data and activity be collaborative and accessible. In this apocryphal design firm, installers and project managers would benefit from access to data while on the job, updated client communications and change requests are updated and shared as they occur and management can gain a clear in-depth understanding regarding the specific preferences of individual customers, analyze customer and market trends and build effective sales strategies to build their business. It is far more costly to a cquire a new customer than to retain an existing one but retention requires excellent customer service at every level of interaction and even afterward.

The most powerful sales technique came from 'would you like fries with that'. This simple question became the foundation for a new generation of upselling. With cloud based CRM services, a small business can take this to a whole new level, targeting specific opportunities to service your existing clients and, understanding these trends, where to look for new ones.

Remember that the head of this design firm stated that the angst of implementing new software made her team reluctant in learning any new program. My response to this objection is a simple and to the point. Cloud based services don't require installation, hardware and are browser and computer agnostic (they work on a MAC or a PC and will work in the browser of your choice). Our VP of Sales was particularly proud of a recent client implementation: the whole project took 10 minutes and that included all instructions.

To quote Claudio Marcus, research director at Gartner: "CRM is not part of a business strategy; CRM is the business strategy" irrespective of the size of your business. Small businesses cannot stand still technologically. We can't imagine conducting our business using only landlines and we shouldn't be reluctant to bring in cloud based services because our experience, and frustrations, with desktop software.