Maintaining positive customer relationships is an extremely important consideration for every business. One of the best tools any business can use is the customer relationship management (CRM) platform. While most CRMs have similar features, some come with more advancements; and higher costs. Today, we will get into what type of CRM you should consider for each level of business.

Breaking Down Businesses

Before we get into the benefits an organization should gain from deploying a CRM, let's briefly break down business size in four ways.

• Startup or micro business - A business with under seven employees
• Small business - A business with eight to 15 employees
• Mid-sized business - A business with 16-to-250 employees
• Enterprise - A business with over 250 employees

The way that most CRM developers work is to make their product the most comprehensive they can for the amount of revenue they take in. This means that most CRM developers make their offerings for larger businesses because they could maximize the value of their offering; especially with many companies making cloud-hosted options a priority. Let’s go through each set of businesses and talk about what they need from their CRM.

Startup or Microbusiness: Basics of a CRM

Most businesses are worried about cost, but as a startup or microbusiness (many times a solo effort or a business with very few employees) it could be a more pressing matter. For these business owners, a paid CRM may just be out of scope for their purposes. Fortunately for them, there are many free-to-use CRMs that can set a business up for the growth they will experience. 

CRM developers do this to promote the use of their platform while getting in at the ground level. Most businesses, especially businesses that are just starting out will benefit from the built-in automation, sales and prospect management, and more. 

Small Business: Growth Brings New Demands

For the small business that is growing, the needs they have are largely the same as startups. They are growing and their central management software has to both be cost-effective as well as robust. Since most CRMs charge by the user, smaller businesses will be paying for theirs, but there are many options that can keep businesses from spending too much. Many CRMs offer cloud-based platforms that give anytime-anywhere access to users. 

This is also the stage where the term KPI comes into play. The key performance indicator is any measurable metric that gives insight into how some aspect of a business is performing. There are KPIs attached to procurement, sales, productivity, employee performance, etc. By determining the important KPIs that provide insight into how your business is functioning, you can make more insightful—and therefore lucrative—decisions. 

Mid-Sized Business: Robust Automation

When a business gets to this point, they have to consider where to go with their CRM platform. With so many users, it’s probably prudent to consider larger-scale platforms that can handle more dynamic and robust automation. There may be some reluctance to change to a new solution, but there are significant differences between a CRM built for ease of use and management, to more complex, yet insightful software. 

What it comes down to is: does your business need automation tools and customizable solutions to better do what your company does? Otten, as businesses grow, they need software that covers all that their business does and does a superior job of automating and making available back-end data that can have a marked effect on decision making.

Enterprise: End-to-End Customization

Chances are that without an end-to-end, continuously improving CRM, no company becomes an enterprise. Even then the needs of large companies can extend beyond what even the most dynamic CRMs are capable of. An enterprise CRM is typically one that either has developer-side integrations for outside software to cover the immense amount of situations these large companies deal in, or it is consistently customized by a team tasked with the management of the solution itself.

Enterprise CRMs have robust lead-scoring capabilities that often trigger automated interactions to keep consumers, whether they are established with the company or new customers, engaged. Since they are constantly being improved upon, it stands to reason that they will have all the bells and whistles needed by a company to manage everything that could have anything to do with customer relationships, task management, data collection, reporting, and resulting compliance. 

The CRM is undeniably one of the most important tools in business today, and if you have the right one for your particular needs, you will see the benefits of it almost immediately. At Dresner Group, our IT experts can help your organization fit technology to your needs and ensure that you do it cost-effectively. Give us a call today at (410) 531-6727 to find out more.