8 Reasons Why Every Small Business Needs an Easy-to-Use CRM Software [2023 Updated]

If you’re like most small business owners, you’re always looking for ways to make your life easier. And if you’re not using a simple, easy-to-use CRM software, then you’re definitely missing out.

A CRM is not just a valuable tool, but an indispensable asset for busy entrepreneurs aiming to build and improve their customer relations, optimize their business operations and enhance overall efficiency.

In today’s fast-paced business landscape, managing numerous contacts, tracking sales progress, and generating revenue can become overwhelming without a reliable system in place.

A simple but powerful CRM can help you organize your contacts, track your sales progress, and increase revenue.

By implementing a CRM, entrepreneurs can effectively streamline their business processes and consolidate important information into a centralized platform.

This allows for easy access and organization of contact details, such as names, email addresses, phone numbers, and additional relevant information.

With a comprehensive database of contacts readily available, entrepreneurs can quickly retrieve essential customer information whenever needed, ensuring seamless communication and personalized interactions.

Furthermore, a powerful CRM provides entrepreneurs with the ability to track their sales progress in real-time.

By accurately recording and monitoring sales activities, entrepreneurs can gain valuable insights into their sales team’s performance, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions.

This feature allows entrepreneurs to identify potential bottlenecks, optimize their sales strategies, and allocate resources effectively, leading to enhanced productivity and revenue growth.

In addition to contact organization and sales tracking, a robust CRM offers a range of features that further contribute to increased revenue generation.

These features may include lead management, opportunity tracking, pipeline forecasting, and marketing automation.

By efficiently managing leads and opportunities, entrepreneurs can nurture relationships, close deals faster, and capitalize on every sales opportunity.

The ability to forecast sales pipelines empowers entrepreneurs to set realistic targets and make informed decisions regarding resource allocation and expansion plans.

The ROI of a CRM software system, when properly implemented, can exceed 245%. (Tech.co)

Moreover, a CRM often integrates with other essential business tools, such as email marketing platforms, customer support systems, and project management tools.

This integration allows for seamless data flow across various departments, eliminating the need for manual data entry and reducing the chances of errors or duplications.

Such synchronization enhances sales management, collaboration, improves customer service, and provides a comprehensive overview of the entire business operation.

But the problem is, most small businesses find it hard to understand CRM systems and drop the tool even after paying for a whole year’s subscription.

So, if you’re looking to avoid this common mistake and start using a CRM today, here are eight reasons why every small business needs an easy-to-use CRM .

8 Reasons Why Every Small Business Needs an Easy-to-Use CRM Software

• Sales and Marketing Are Unified in One Tool
• Contacts Management Is Clear and Simple to Navigate
• Visual Representation of Your Sales Pipeline
• Booking Your Meetings Has Never Been So Easy
• Task Functions Mean You Never Forget to Follow up
• Automated Activity Logging Frees up Your Day
• Contact Data Is Clear and Precise
• Reliable Sales Reporting Lets You Track Bottlenecks

1. Sales and Marketing Are Unified in One Tool

Unlike other tools that are designed for either sales or marketing, a CRM is the only solution that brings together your entire business strategy under one roof.

This means you can connect with your customers both through email marketing campaigns as well as social media platforms.

A simple CRM that is super easy to use will offer you a wide range of features for both sales and marketing professionals, including marketing automation, email marketing, lead generation, lead scoring, social media monitoring, sales forecasting reports, and much more.

EngageBay is a free CRM solution that even offers video marketing, SMS marketing, and in-app telephony, all for as little as $1 a day.

2. Contacts Management Is Clear and Simple to Navigate

While the days of having to carry a Rolodex are behind us, sometimes it still feels like we’re using a virtual Rolodex when it comes to tracking contacts, right? After all, some contacts are stored in your email system, others are with your marketing team, and still others are in other software you use.

Whew! With a contacts management system like that, it’s no wonder some very potentially valuable leads slip through the cracks.

Instead of shuttling between dozens of software to fetch your contacts, a simple CRM can do the job of organizing all your contacts in one place, with details of company, role, location, the likelihood of conversion, and more.

EngageBay’s free CRM also lets you apply filters for quick and easy contact management. You can even make static lists that you can update manually, or smart lists that the software updates with automation.

3. Visual Representation of Your Sales Pipeline

The progress of your sales pipeline is a crucial one. After all, how else can you track which leads become customers and then which ones become repeat customers? Also, it’s too easy to mismanage deals if your sales pipeline isn’t visually represented.

That means lost revenue for your company. Startups and small businesses can’t afford too many lost deals.

With a simple CRM , you can get an instant overview of your sales pipeline — who’s in the deal, and what needs to be done. Deals can be color-coded and sorted by stage, so you know what to focus on at any given time.

Read more: How to Build and Manage a Sales Pipeline 

4. Booking Your Meetings Has Never Been So Easy

You’re probably very in-demand, so slotting in new appointments in your schedule can be difficult. A simple CRM can integrate Google Calendar and Outlook 365 with its own online calendar.

This CRM meeting scheduler lets your customers find whichever time is convenient for both of you, and set up appointments that show up in the calendar of both. The CRM also sends email reminders both ways.

5. Workflow Automation Means You Never Forget to Follow up

Wouldn’t it be a shame to lose a potential customer because you forgot to follow up? In the life of a busy small business owner, this is unfortunately sometimes the reality. Emails and tasks just pile up, and you always have to focus on the newest thing.

Managing your tasks will be much simpler using workflow automation in a CRM solution like EngageBay.

With workflow automation, you can easily create and manage sales tasks and never forget to follow up again.

A simple CRM like EngageBay can let you create dozens of workflow automations, such as sending the right pre-saved emails when a customer books an appointment, changes track in a deal, or asks a certain query.

Once you understand how to use workflow automation, you can even use custom nodes to build entirely new and personalized workflows.

Email marketing automation in EngageBay

6. Automated Activity Logging Frees up Your Day

As leads move down your sales pipeline, you will have to keep a log of notes, calls, and emails with every potential customer. This information can be reviewed by your sales and marketing teams as they engage with the leads.

It’s necessary then that you don’t lose this important customer data, but you know how it goes.

Sometimes emails just seem to vanish. Physical or digital notes may also get lost. The answer is a CRM solution.

All your customer data is compiled and managed digitally and conveniently. Even better is that everything is done automatically so you don’t have to worry about it yourself.

Instead, you can spend your time coming up with ways to appeal to your customer base or win new customers.

Read more: All You Need to Know About the Sales Automation Process

7. Contact Data Is Clear and Precise

If you’re getting a new lead from your marketing and sales team, what can you glean about them from reading through their information? If you’re using a simple CRM tool like EngageBay, the answer is a whole lot.

That’s because EngageBay tracks every note, meeting, email, and phone call tied to a contact. Combine this with the detailed contact information (such as their name, phone number, email address, company name, and other relevant info) and you can get a clear picture of your lead, even if you’ve never communicated with them before.

This is handy for a few good reasons:

• It prevents you from wasting so much time tracking that email thread or call log.
• It gets easier for your sales and marketing teams to do their jobs well since they know more about each lead.
• You can get lead scores more effectively since you have so much info to go off.

It’s a win-win-win!

Also read: CRM for B2B — How to Make Your Business More Profitable

8. Reliable Sales Reporting Lets You Track Bottlenecks

No matter how well you and your company think you’re doing, the only way to know for certain is with sales reporting.

EngageBay’s sales reporting module was designed to produce detailed reports that are super easy to comprehend. That means plenty of graphs, charts, and clearly-displayed data and numbers for your perusal.

You can see the areas in which your company is doing its best as well as those in which you should work harder.

With such clear-cut and customized reports, you can easily share the data among your sales and marketing teams. They can then put their heads together to create new sales campaigns for leads that have not converted.

Read more: 7 Awesome Sales Automation Tools to Supercharge Your Revenue

Conclusion

As the world continues to evolve, keeping pace with new technologies and trends becomes crucial for businesses to thrive.

In this rapidly changing landscape, CRM has emerged as a pivotal tool that holds immense importance not only for sales teams but also for marketing teams.

The digital age has brought about a multitude of transformations, particularly in the realm of online business.

With the ever-increasing demand for content creation, the need to produce engaging social media advertisements, and the constant quest to optimize website pages for search engine optimization (SEO), small businesses often find themselves grappling with numerous tasks and responsibilities.

Managing these aspects efficiently without a robust CRM tool can be a daunting challenge.

A reliable CRM can serve as the backbone for small businesses seeking to navigate the complexities of the digital world. By leveraging the capabilities of a CRM system, businesses can effectively streamline their marketing efforts and ensure seamless coordination between different teams and departments.

Whether it’s managing customer data, tracking marketing campaigns, or analyzing customer engagement metrics, a CRM empowers marketing teams to stay organized and make data-driven decisions.

With the help of a CRM tool, businesses can centralize their customer information, including preferences, purchase history, and interactions, in one easily accessible location.

This centralized database ensures that marketing teams have a holistic view of their customers, enabling them to create highly targeted and personalized campaigns.

By understanding customer behaviors and preferences, businesses can tailor their content creation, social media advertisements, and website pages to resonate with their target audience, ultimately driving higher engagement and conversion rates.

Moreover, a good CRM can assist in managing the customer journey effectively. From capturing leads to nurturing them through various stages of the sales funnel, a CRM system enables businesses to implement automated marketing workflows and personalized communication.

By automating routine marketing tasks and leveraging data-driven insights, businesses can optimize their marketing strategies and deliver timely, relevant messages to their customers, fostering stronger relationships and increasing customer loyalty.

In addition, CRM can provide valuable analytics and reporting features. By tracking and analyzing key marketing metrics, businesses can gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of their campaigns, identify areas of improvement, and make informed decisions for future marketing endeavors.

This data-driven approach empowers small businesses to allocate their resources wisely, invest in the right channels, and refine their marketing strategies to yield better results.

In conclusion, as the digital landscape continues to evolve and businesses face increasing demands to produce content, create engaging social media ads, and optimize their online presence, a reliable CRM software has become an indispensable tool.

With its ability to centralize customer information, streamline marketing efforts, and provide valuable analytics, a CRM system empowers small businesses to effectively manage their marketing activities and drive growth in the competitive online marketplace.

By embracing CRM technology, businesses can stay ahead of the curve, deliver personalized experiences, and build lasting customer relationships.

EngageBay’s free CRM software is designed specifically for small business owners who want an easy way to track their customer relationship management while still being able to forecast revenue numbers into the future.

If you’re looking for a reliable yet user-friendly tool that will help your company grow this year, just sign up for no cost and we’ll get back to you for a free demo!