As a small business on your way to becoming a bigger business, you’ve come to a point where you can’t rely on just your office software to handle things like CRM. You have serious competition when you become a bigger business, and you have to deal with the need to constantly adapt to changing demographics, expectations and customer mentalities altogether. So, you find yourself on the market for sales CRM and other forms of CRM platform to handle analytics, forecasting, and most importantly of all, the best possible support.
The customer journey is a tricky beast, and without the proper CRM platform to back you, you can’t compare complaints, requests and churn patterns to spot an ultimate pattern that may require you to change how you handle things, and retain your competitive edge and appeal to your customers. It is an equation, even with the randomness of humans involved, computers are very good at predicting and spotting these patterns when they are programmed appropriately to do so.
So, what should you look for in a platform for this? How do they work?
First of all, you a choice to make a whether or not you want specific CRM platform implementations are sales, journey tracking and so forth, or if you want to go with an all-in-one system that handles all of these different CRM needs.
This is probably the best idea for most businesses, though if you decide to go with multiple different implementations for different assets, be sure to ensure that there are interoperability features that allow them to share data, communicate with each other and work together as a tight, super organism type of implementation.
Your next question is going to be method of delivery/deployment. Traditionally, software is installed on every device that needs to use it, locally from either disks or downloads. With personal software, this is going to be the way things work for quite a long time. Your average PC user doesn’t want to have to deal with browser-based software interfaces nor do they want to deal with the subscription fees of software as a service. For a business, though, especially one with mix hardware where you’re using computers, tablets and phones throughout your day, this really isn’t practical.
Software as a service is subscription-based, usually running through a browser. Don’t worry, these technologies use the latest in HTML 5 implementations, meaning that they are very responsive, stable and functional. As long as you have a broadband connection, you should have no problem with the. The nice thing is, they are platform agnostic, you never have to worry about doing updates, migrating or reinstalling for new hardware, and admittedly while the subscription fee seems annoying, considering most business we see us all locally cost thousands of dollars for a single installation, it winds up being cheaper in the long run.
You owe it to your business to upgrade to modern sales CRM and other CRM platform solutions, so you can adapt and provide the best support for your customers possible, starting at sales and conversion and continuing for the rest of their hopefully long-term journey. Remember, always get a demo of software solutions before committing to them!
