CRM For Small Businesses

Being a small business owner, you need a small business crm. You need a solution specifically designed for small businesses, a system free from features you don't want, free from overhead, staffing, training and administration costs you can't afford.

When it comes to buying a crm package for small organizations, business owners are skeptical and often times, a little confused.

• Will this CRM meet my existing and future requirements?
• Can I afford it?
• What are the dependencies?
• How much time I have to invest in mastering the operation of this technology?
• How cost effective it is, in terms of migration, upgrades, maintenance and sustainability?

With time, small business owners realize that their current crm is not aligned with the flow of their business, there are just too many distractions and barriers that don't complement the core sales flow. In reality, a general CRM solution seldom aligns with the flow of a small business because a general crm demands staffing, training and complex operational procedures which are beyond the scope of small business organizations.

Small Businesses vs Enterprise - The Differences in Operational Flow and Customer Relationships

To understand why small businesses need a lightweight crm application, lets compare the usual business workflow of small businesses and large enterprises.

Regardless of the type of business, relationships are tied to people or entities. In general, the owner of a small business interacts directly with customers and is responsible for customer interactions.

If the small business is organized and well managed, customer relationships are managed through sales representatives, managers and support executives. The customer usually gets to know the people who are involved in the transaction and the relationship fosters. The relationship is a real world relationship, tightly drilled between a handful of people.

But compare the situation with big enterprises, large corporations who have many clients and millions of customers spread across the globe. Here, the customer barely gets to know the person involved in the business workflow. As a customer, you may have relationship with a sales rep, who hooked you to another "expert" sales rep. Then the deal carried onto a manager, then to an accountant, to billing department and finally to a customer service department in another country. By the time the deal was finalized, the manager was not available because he found a new job and then another person came in.

Customer relationships in large enterprises are complicated, virtual and always evolving through a chain of contacts, phone numbers, email addresses and other indirect routines. Enterprises address this issue by using an advanced crm application, they have sufficient staffs and funds to invest, they deploy trainings and spend a good amount of time and energy in educating their staff how to use the crm.

Now the question is

Can the same CRM which big businesses and enterprises use be repackaged, repriced and used by small businesses?