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More and better free CRM software is one happy result.įree CRM systems offer the opportunity to try out a platform with your team and see if you can derive value from it without dishing out on the initial investment-especially if you’re a small business or a budding startup on a lean budget a crm for small business is the way to go. Intensified competition and the “Uberization” trend have conspired to push costs down, ease the adoption curve, and increase quality and features. The CRM industry has been growing at a crazy pace in recent years. Relevant information like stats and analytics are instantly created from any number of readily-available data sets, while team member task assignments can be as simple as drag-n-drop action. With CRM you get readable versions with useful charts featuring extensive data and customer histories.
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This is where a lot of software companies take pride, providing an upgrade from dreaded static spreadsheets, and complicated funnels/sales pipelines. There’s also an emphasis on the user-friendliness of today’s CRM. To streamline means to have all that essential data in one place-the ability to analyze, organize, and optimize-so that companies can paint their best customer behavior portrait. CRM achieves this by combining what could be several different programs into one single platform: customer communication, email marketing, phone, data logging and retrieval, reports and analytics, work task assignment, etc.
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“Streamline” is understood as making things faster and easier. OK, so, customer relationship management software is there to help streamline work for the sales team-or a number of other purposes such as social media management, leads/contacts organization, customer support, email campaigns, lead scoring, subscriptions, sign-ups, etc. Synthesis: Good CRM software should be a snap to set up and a piece of cake to learn.
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Thesis: CRM software saves your business time.Īntithesis: Setting up and learning how to use a CRM takes time. Let’s take a step back and approach the CRM question tangentially, using some good old fashioned dialectical reasoning:
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