Beyond ensuring your inventory is stocked, your employees are providing top-notch customer service and your business has generated enough money to keep the lights on another month, a company owner also other concerns. Chief among them is attracting new customers while keeping the current ones happy, and, if the stars align, re-activate previous customers, too. With so many responsibilities to attend to, it can be useful for a small business owner to assign some tasks to customer relationship marketing software. According to Alan Walker, owner of Rocco Riley Properties in Salt Lake City, Utah, customer relationship marketing software is “the workhorse that keeps everything running. It is great for organizing customers, filtering data, delivering reports and contacting customers.”
When selecting the right customer relationship marketing software for your enterprise, Walker suggests using one that is the “standard of the industry” in which the entity is involved. He says he would much rather use “a process that has been thought through and proven than come up with one of my own. Leverage the system’s experience to catapult your business into the next level.”
Customer relationship marketing software can be beneficial for small business owners because it:
- Is generally inexpensive for one to two administrators
- Can help get an enterprise up and going faster than cobbling together data collection forms, creating spreadsheets, etc.
- Is usually supported by libraries of plug-ins tailored to specific industries
- The limitations inherent in the program that can decrease your company’s effectiveness or ability to thrive
- The challenges of migrating to a new system from the one your company has been relying on
- The likelihood that technical support will be needed to use the software efficiently and effectively
If you are spending a lot of your time and effort on tasks whose return on investment don’t justify that effort, such as data entry, report building and mass communication, tools such as customer relationship marketing software allow business owners to offload a lot of it. If, by utilizing software to handle some of these tasks your plate would be less full, then it’s probably time to start using it.
Sure, you can also delegate the efforts to an employee, but utilizing software not only speeds up the process but saves money in the long run, too.
“It’s never been easier to start a business. One of the reasons for that is that you can find a tool today that meets your needs, sign up and be off and running before your next coffee break!” says Walker.
Tami Kamin Meyer is an Ohio attorney and writer. She tweets as @girlwithapen.
