The Big List of CRM Improvements
Is your small business looking to generate more leads, close more sales, or improve customer retention without spending a fortune? Relax, ShoestringCRM presents The Big List of Small Business CRM Improvements - ways to generate more (and better!) leads, close more sales, deliver exceptional service, and implement the right technology.
Generate More Leads
1. Evaluate Your Marketing Spend (free): Building a broader customer base will inevitably require you to have a larger pool of leads to work from. However, it isn't enough to simply work with a larger number of leads. The quality of your leads should be examined closely. What does your business pay (both in terms of dollars and time) on marketing campaigns to generate leads? Are you able to effectively differentiate the sources of your most successful leads from your least successful ones? Identifying the sources of each can help you re-balance those marketing dollars and focus your budget on more successful campaigns.
2. Expand Your Online Reach (free): The internet can provide your business with unlimited growth opportunities. If you consider the value that each new customer adds to your bottom line, taking advantage of all the web has to offer is a must.
- Set up a blog! Own a restaurant, bike shop, or pet grooming service? Starting a blog can give you a way to connect with existing customers as well as help new customers find you and learn more about your business.
- Take advantage of free online advertising - as advertising programs such as Google Adwords, Yahoo, Adbrite, and many others look to expand their market share in the online advertising space, there are some signup discounts that can provide you with packages of free online advertising dollars just for signing up. Such discount codes have appeared on this site in the past, but your best bet is to search for terms such as Adwords Promo Code to find the most current deals out there.
- Reach out to complimentary businesses - you will find that many other businesses that compliment yours are always looking to expand their online reach as well. Offer to exchange links or, even better, provide quick testimonials for one another on your sites.
- Evaluate your keyword choices in online advertising campaigns - are you getting the most bang for your buck? Review your keyword selections and ask yourself - is this really the keyword phrase that someone making a buying decision would search for? Also, look for opportunities wherever possible to avoid high-dollar keyword combination and look for quality phrases available at lower costs.
Close More Leads
3. Fresh Training for Your Sales Force ($99): Training can make a sales force much more effective. However, many small business find that it is difficult to justify taking sales team members out of the field for several hours (or days) at a time. In addition, top training programs can be quite expensive. There are good solutions available. High-quality sales training programs can now be found on DVD. Pick one up and watch as a team over pizza and popcorn or, if your budget allows, order a copy for each member of your team and let them watch as time allows. Improved sales techniques can pay for themselves quickly.
Deliver Exceptional Service
4. Implement Service Level Agreements (free): Service Level Agreements (SLAs) can allow your business to set expectations appropriately with your customers, allow your company to gain credibility when SLAs are met, and give you something to track and measure when you don't. SLAs can allow you to preemptively contact customers before an SLA is missed, giving you the opportunity to diffuse a potential lost customer before he or she is fed up and walks away. Developing Service Level Agreements is relatively easy to do and can be done on a limited or non-existant budget.
5. Solicit Feedback From Your Customers (free): If you have a good CRM software solution, you probably have some good quantitative metrics to review customer satisfaction and, more importantly, customer churn. However, do you have the qualitative information that you need in order to better understand what drives those metrics? There are a number of methods to get this information, but all of them will require you to solicit feedback directly from your customers. Anything from simple comment cards, to online surveys, to more elaborate focus groups and proactive survey techniques are available to your business. Pick the one that is right for your budget, but make sure that you are doing what you can to understand what might be driving your customers' behaviors.
Improve Customer Retention
6. Develop a Loyalty Program (varies): Loyalty (or Rewards) Programs can encourage repeat business among satisfied customers who may be able to justify more frequent purchases from your business than they might normally make. A loyalty program can be as simple as a "buy 8, get 1 free" punch card, or as elaborate as the American Express Membership Rewards program. Either way, the same type of behavior is encouraged. Just be sure to target your rewards to the type of customer you are looking to attract. A recent Inc. Magazine article offered some good ideas on how to develop an effective small business loyalty program.
Implement Technical Solutions
7. Implement CRM Software ($99): Customer Relationship Management software isn't just for the big boys anymore. Small business CRM software is now available for companies with much smaller budgets. These packages offer many of the key functionality available in the larger CRM software suites but maintain a focus on the needs (and limitations) of small businesses. Pricing can be a differentiating factor with these packages: solutions such as Zoho CRM offer 5 licenses for as little as $99.
8. Clean Up Your Existing CRM Data (free): Already have a CRM system but don't feel like you are getting much out of it? Revisit the reasons you got the CRM in the first place. What metrics were you looking to monitor? Who were your intended users? Ask your infrequent users why they don't use the system? Do they need additional training? Is the software too complex? Are too many fields required? Are they confident in the quality of the data? In businesses of all sizes, data quality can become an issue and must be dealt with thouroughly. Whatever the issue with your existing CRM solution, be sure to understand the problems that you are facing before junking the system or replacing it with a better one.
