In this 4-minute read, learn:
- What’s the best CRM for small business 2020
- What are the best small business CRM features
- Why every small business needs CRM software
CRM is the #1 software market today, bringing in nearly $40 billion worldwide, growing 16% per year, and used by 91% of businesses with more than 11 employees. But chances are, if you’re a small business owner, you never even heard the term “CRM” until the past few years.
Outside of large, “enterprise-level” companies, customer relationship management systems were unheard of.
However, as the digital revolution has hit Main Street, a limited number of CRM software platforms have been developed to meet the unique needs of busy small business owners.
The right CRM can level the playing field against the Walmarts and Amazons of the world, by allowing owners to know, market to, and retain their customers— thus increasing revenue.
Attract and keep more customers, and get smarter about their impact on your business with CRM software specifically built for busy small business owners and operators. Learn more, plus get free reputation monitoring and customer insights when you sign up for Womply Free!
Before we talk about the key features that make CRMs vital for any small business (including mom-and-pop shops, restaurants, hair salons, tire shops, shoe stores, and every other local business), let’s talk about the key customer relationship problems small businesses face— problems that any CRM intended for small business must solve.
- Small businesses don’t know who their customers are, other than a handful of “regulars”
- Small businesses have difficulty collecting customer contact information, and attaching transaction and communications history to customer records
- Small businesses struggle with segmenting customers into appropriate categories to enable effective marketing campaigns
The main reason small business owners have not been concerned with a CRM is that there simply wasn’t a CRM designed for them. Fortunately, that is changing.
There are now several CRMs intended for small businesses. Many, though, are designed for “small- to medium-sized businesses”— medium-sized businesses have over 100 and up to 999 employees— which really makes them irrelevant to the vast majority of local shops.
So what are the key attributes that make the best CRM for small businesses like yours?
The best CRM for small business 2020 must fit a small-business budget
Small business owners living on slim, 2-3% profit margins can’t afford to pay thousands of dollars a month for an enterprise-level CRM solution.
The best CRM for small businesses will be affordable and provide an immediate benefit for the business.
Enterprise CRM platforms were built for massive businesses with enormous amounts of working capital and huge marketing budgets, and many of them have complicated pricing structures.
Any good small business CRM must be built from the beginning for small businesses and with a fundamental understanding of their unique situation and budget constraints, rather than as an afterthought or “watered down” version of a large enterprise CRM.
You might also like: Does my small business need an online CRM?
The best CRM for small business must be simple to use
Enterprise-level CRMs like Salesforce and Oracle pretty much require one or more full-time staff members whose sole job is managing the CRM platform and extracting data for marketing and customer experience management teams. Does that sound like something a small business owner has the time or resources to do? Nope.
What’s more, even many CRMs intended for smaller businesses require multiple hours of work per week manually inputting customer addresses, gathering email information and other relevant data, and managing any marketing campaigns.
Busy small business owners need a CRM that simplifies their lives, not one that makes it more complicated.
While enterprise CRM software is designed to drive usage and engagement, the best small business CRM software should automate most if not all key tasks to keep owner/user inputs to an absolute minimum, and save busy small business owners as much time as possible.
CRM software that requires continual time and effort from business owners simply will not get used.
Womply’s CRM software has been shown to save the average business owner 10 hours every week. Imagine what you could do with an extra 10 hours per week!
The best small business CRM will be “pre-populated” with useful data
The main problem small businesses face where CRM is concerned is that they don’t know their customers.
Big companies use multimillion-dollar systems and sales processes that allow them to collect and collate customer names, contact information, credit card info, email addresses, and more, but local retailers may only know a few “regulars” and have no real way to collect, organize, and update customer data.
At Womply we call this the “zero data problem.” Womply has solved the zero data problem for small businesses by creating the only pre-populated CRM in the world.
When a customer transacts with the business, Womply CRM automatically creates or updates a customer profile, drawing on a proprietary database of 250+ million consumer profiles and more than $1 trillion in transaction data.
The benefits to the business are twofold: a comprehensive customer list that gets better every day, and a frictionless way to encourage repeat visits from those customers through automated email marketing—even if they don’t have customer email addresses.
And as we have written recently, email marketing is hands-down the most powerful, effective, and efficient marketing tool for small businesses.
See if Womply CRM is right for your small business
In developing Womply CRM, we went down a very different path from traditional CRMs like Salesforce, HubSpot, Oracle, or Zoho. To best serve the small-business market, we intentionally boiled CRM down to its most vital components: automatically creating customer records, appending critical customer profile information, and enabling automated marketing campaigns.
Anything that didn’t solve one of those problems — and couldn’t do so nearly automatically — didn’t make the cut.
Womply CRM leverages multiple data sources to:
- Automatically create and update customer records
- Append contact information, transaction data, communications records, and more
- Use customer information to segment customers and send timely, targeted marketing messages
Bottom line? Womply businesses get 22% more repeat visitors and increase revenue by 20%. If small businesses can track every customer interaction and keep in touch with them after they leave the store, that’s the essence of CRM— and a true game-changer for busy small business owners.
We’re excited to bring CRM to Main Street. Learn more at Womply.com/CRM, plus get free reputation monitoring and customer insights when you sign up for Womply Free!
Read more about the launch of Womply CRM in this article from our founder, Toby Scammell.