CRM Software for Small Businesses

These days, you’re probably hearing the term “CRM” get thrown around a whole lot more.  But unless you’ve worked for a large organization that uses a CRM, then you might not be familiar with the concept.  CRM stands for customer relationship management, and CRM software is basically just a database that helps you track and manage those customer relationships.

You’ve probably heard of large software companies like Salesforce and Hubspot, but their services can be complicated and take a lot of time and expertise to get fully integrated with your other software.  What if you’ve never used a CRM before and are just looking for something simple that will fit a small business?

Here are the top things that you want to look for:

Key Features

Any CRM should have a way for you to manage all of your customer contacts.  You want to be able to view all of your customer contacts in an organized way and then pull up a more detailed view that will give you some more detail about your relationship with them and any transactions you’ve previously done with them.

But not everyone in your CRM will be a current customer.  Some of them will be prospective customers whom you’re trying to sell to.  So your CRM should have some kind of sales pipeline management feature that allows you to designate a contact as a current customer or something earlier in the sales funnel like a bare lead or a qualified lead.  Then you’ll be able to manage your overall sales funnel better because you’ll know how many prospective customers you have at each stage of the funnel.

Key Integrations

The more comfortable you get with your CRM, the more you’ll probably start expecting it to do.  That’s when you’ll probably start to think about how your CRM integrates with your other software so that it can display more information for you more easily.

For example, you might want your CRM to integrate with your accounting and billing software.  That way, whenever you open up a customer contact in your CRM, you can see how much your customer owes you in your accounts receivable, and you can see whether they’re late on any payments.  That will make it easier for you to gently remind your customer to pay you quickly the next time you meet with them, and getting them to do that can really improve your working capital.

You might also want your CRM to integrate with any task and workflow management software that you use.  Just as you might want to check your CRM to see if your customer owes you money, you might also want to check to see if YOU owe your customer anything.  It very well may be that a customer hasn’t paid you for work that you’ve already done because they’re still waiting for you to complete a larger, more important project, and you might want to be aware of your outstanding deliverables before you start pinging your customers to pay their outstanding bills.

Try Haven!

All of that might sound great to you, but what if you don’t feel like you’re tech-savvy enough to pull off even those few integrations?  Then try Haven!  Haven unites small business teams with a single, easy-to-use platform that includes all of your core business functions in one user-friendly interface.

With Haven, you actually don’t even need to go through the hassle of integrating different software applications because Haven is designed to have everything you need in one place.  Your CRM will always know what’s going on with your accounts receivable and your task management system and will match everything to customer records in your CRM because they’re already a part of Haven, and you can spend less time managing your business and more time actually earning revenue.

Reach out to us today and schedule a demo!