Customer relationship management is important for businesses of every size, but it's particularly critical for startups. Unfortunately, rather than investing in a CRM solution, startups manually oversee relationships with their customers. This may work in a business's earliest days, when it has few leads and little brand reputation to speak of.
However, it quickly becomes unsustainable as a business grows. Eventually, as interest starts to build and prospects start piling up, you'll start to fall behind. You'll start losing qualified leads to your competitors at a time when every sale is crucial.
That's not something any startup can afford.
Why is Customer Relationship Management Important for Startups?
You cannot rely on spreadsheets and manual recordkeeping to keep track of customer data and interactions, and not just because it leaves your sales team with little time to focus on anything else.
You need a more efficient means of tracking and analyzing your business's relationship with its customers. This is precisely what CRM systems achieve. They allow you to streamline operations, eliminating unnecessary manual work from your sales process while simultaneously providing your sales team with deeper insights into the leads they're pursuing.
With the right CRM tools, startups can prevent qualified leads from falling through the cracks and getting poached by competitors — and that isn't the only thing they can help your business do.
The Benefits of Implementing CRM for Startups
Sustainable Growth
Manual customer relationship management is not the least bit scalable. The right CRM system, on the other hand, can easily grow alongside your business. With a scalable, extensible means of managing customer relationships, you don't need to modify your business processes, integrate new systems into your stack, or retrain your employees.
Instead, you can simply focus on growth without worrying about whether your ecosystem can keep up.
Smarter Decision-Making
For a startup, understanding your audience is the key to your success. The more you know about your customers, the more effectively your sales team can connect and build relationships with them. There's another factor here as well, however.
Since you're working with severely limited resources compared to your larger and more established competitors, you can't afford to waste time on unqualified leads. You need to make sure your salespeople focus their attention on cultivating connections that result in sales. With a CRM, startups such as yours can easily accomplish this.
This is because, among other things, you can use a CRM for streamlined lead scoring, automatically identifying your most qualified leads and letting your team know who to contact.
Lower Overhead
Productivity is more than a revenue generator. It's also a cost saving measure. A CRM platform helps your startup reduce overhead in a few ways:
- Your team spends less time searching for details on prospects and leads, and more time pursuing them.
- Through automation, you're able to grow with a smaller team than you'd need if you relied entirely on manual sales processes.
- By centralizing and consolidating customer data, you ensure that there are fewer mistakes — and fewer lost opportunities.
Less Wasted Time
Per McKinsey & Company, roughly a third of all sales tasks can be automated. This means that through sales automation, even a small team can potentially save themselves hundreds of hours per year. For a startup that level of efficiency is immensely valuable.
In addition to saving time, with even a simple CRM startups can improve workplace collaboration and promote alignment between their sales, marketing, and customer success teams. In other words, they can operate like a well-oiled machine, significantly improving their long-term outlook in the process.
Easy Deployment
Another major challenge facing startups is that they usually lack a dedicated IT department. Because skilled tech professionals are in such short supply, employing one is usually well outside the budget of smaller businesses. Fortunately, most CRM tools don't require a great deal of technical expertise to deploy and configure.
They require neither complicated infrastructure nor a complex installation process — meaning a startup can easily purchase, deploy, and hit the ground running the moment it finds a CRM system that fulfills its needs.
A Better Customer Experience
At the end of the day, your customers are the lifeblood of your startup. Without them, your business simply cannot exist. This means that, more than anything else, you need to provide them with the best experience possible.
That means reaching out to them at key points in their journey with personalized messaging. It means responding to customer requests and issues as promptly as possible. It means treating each customer as a valued partner rather than an asset or a revenue stream.
A CRM makes this considerably easier to achieve. It equips everyone from sales reps to your support team with full access to a customer's entire history of communication, interactions and transactions. This in turn enables a more consistent customer experience by allowing anyone on your team to pick up where their colleagues left off.
The end result is a significant upturn in customer satisfaction — and ultimately, greater long-term success.
What to Look for In a CRM for Startups
Especially for smaller organizations, there are certain CRM features that are non-negotiable. Your CRM system should do more than passively track customer interactions and sales. Because it can do a great deal more than that.
It can integrate and consolidate tools and functionality across every customer-facing department and use case within your company, including:
- Sales management.
- Sales enablement.
- Email marketing and SMS automation workflows.
- Comprehensive CRM analytics and reporting.
- Lead management.
- Mobile CRM.
- The capacity to deploy, configure, and customize your CRM with the features that your startup most requires.
- Support for omnichannel marketing, including social media, search, and paid advertisements.
- A built-in API to support custom integrations.
- Workflow automation.
- Sales forecasting.
- Pipeline management.
Bear in mind that the list above is meant to be a list of general recommendations. Depending on your business and industry, your own requirements will be unique. A CRM for SaaS startups, for instance, is going to look very different from an eCommerce CRM.
With that in mind, here's how you can assess whether or not a CRM tool is a good fit for your startup:
- Define your business objectives, then identify which CRM features are non-negotiable in light of those goals.
- Set a preferred budget and a maximum budget so you have a bit of wiggle room in terms of contract negotiations. Never go over your maximum.
- Research a multitude of different vendors. Ideally, you want to find one with experience in your industry — but if that's not possible, you can simply compare vendors based on price, feature-set, and reputation.
- Make sure you find a CRM platform that's highly customizable and easy to use. You don't want to have to spend a ton of time training up your employees once you've deployed the new system.
- Consider assessing prospective vendors by registering for a free trial.
Put Your Startup on the Map with Fireberry's CRM
Customer relationship management is extremely important for a startup. You can't afford to fumble or miss out on qualified leads, nor can you afford to alienate existing customers. You need to make sure your team has all the necessary tools and information to find, connect with, and retain as many prospects as possible.
At Fireberry, we've built an industry-leading CRM platform to help you accomplish that. Powerful and intuitive, our solution can be deployed without any programming and customized with multiple pre-designed building blocks. Factor in our comprehensive automation, wide range of integrations, and flexible API, and it should be clear that we provide everything your startup needs to thrive.
If you're still not sold, you can give Fireberry a try for free — you can also feel free to reach out to us and schedule a demo.
