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How To Determine The Right CRM And Marketing Automation For SMBs

Forbes Communications Council
POST WRITTEN BY
William Flaiz

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As businesses focus on gathering and using relevant data to gain true insights into their customers' needs and buying habits, adopting customer relationship management software and marketing automation has never been more important.

Many small and medium-sized business (SMB) marketers, unfortunately, see these tools as something that they don't need until they scale up. However, sales-focused customer relationship management (CRM) software and marketing automation software aren't just for the large-scale enterprises; they're scalable to offer real-time analytics, automated customer interactions and a better return on marketing investment.

At Bottom Line Strategy Group, we work with SMBs to help determine the right CRM and marketing automation platforms to fit their business needs. We work with these companies to identify, evaluate and set up technologies that work right for their businesses to ensure adoption and realization of the benefits of their investments.

While CRM and marketing automation technology are often used interchangeably, they actually serve two distinct purposes. CRM software is sales-focused, while marketing automation focuses, unsurprisingly, on marketing.

Customer Relationship Manager

Customer relationships are key to the growth of your business, so it's imperative that you manage them effectively. CRM technology can help you become more connected to your customers, improve the performance of your business and grow your company. It does so in the following ways:

Tracking Sales Efficiency: CRM makes it simple to get the bigger sales, allowing you to track customer interactions and prioritize leads and opportunities that are most likely to convert and close.

Recognizing Upsell Opportunities: CRM software provides a simple way to see what products and services are often purchased together. It lets you see all the current opportunities that are a good fit for add-on deals.

Keeping Your Customers: It's a common pain point among small and medium-sized businesses: A salesperson leaves the company and takes a portion of their clients with them. By utilizing CRM technology, you can significantly reduce the likelihood of losing customers when you lose a salesperson. Every member of your sales team has immediate access to any customer's complete history, allowing any one of them to quickly answer questions and provide personalized solutions. This creates smoother transitions, building the trust of your customers and encouraging repeat business.

What A CRM Can’t Do: A common misconception about CRM products is that you license or purchase them and they are ready to go and work for your business. A CRM is a tool that needs to be configured to properly support your unique business and the needs of your sales teams in order to reap its benefits. Developing relationships with prospects is still the key to acquiring new business; a CRM does not replace this, but it does make relationship building more time-effective by focusing on what matters to the prospect.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is a powerful tool for SMB marketers, helping them maximize efficiency, recognize well-qualified leads and improve overall campaign management. Here are a few ways it can assist:

Maximizing Efficiency: Marketing automation software can be used to automate numerous marketing interactions, including blog management, social media publishing, email workflows, content offers and building a contact database. This is essential for small businesses with limited staff.

Lead Nurturing: Today's customers often require long-term marketing strategies as they pursue more information about a company's offerings and establish trust with them. With marketing automation, you can retain customer engagement and foster relationships with potential buyers with cross-channel marketing campaigns.

Overall Campaign Management: Marketing automation gives you a richer, more detailed picture of potential customer behavior, bringing valuable insight to use for smarter marketing decisions.

What Marketing Automation Can't Do: One thing businesses need to keep in mind when licensing a marketing automation solution is that it is the vehicle to deliver campaigns and monitor touch points with prospects; it is not a tool that creates the messaging and value-added content or a replacement for the creative side of marketing. When licensing a marketing automation solution, businesses need to also know they will still invest time and effort in developing their campaigns, but the technology will help them leverage that work more efficiently and effectively.

Three Steps To Determine The Right CRM And Automation Tools

When it comes to moving your operations to an automation tool, it's important to make sure that you understand both your needs and expectations and the capabilities of the CRM or marketing automation software you're investing in. As an SMB owner or marketer, the last thing you want to do is make a significant investment and then only use a fraction of the features available to you. Here are three steps to get started:

1. Figure out what you need. The first step to implementing CRM software or marketing automation is defining your goals, summing up the marketing activities that you're currently performing and outlining any activities that you want to start doing in the future.

2. Do your research. There are dozens of software tools available, all with their own unique benefits and applications. Once you've figured out what you need from an automation software tool, you can better evaluate your options and decide where your dollars will best be spent.

3. Find a partner. Whether you start your marketing automation journey with free software or a trial, or you dive right in by purchasing a full-version system, it's important to connect with a representative from their team. Let them know what your goals are and what you've done with the software so far, and they can let you know if there's a tool or feature that you're missing out on.

The war for customer attention is real. Marketing automation can provide you with the knowledge and tools needed to compete with large-scale enterprises, enabling you to increase sales, improve customer interactions and optimize your marketing return on investment.

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