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WHY SHOULD BE CRM IN YOUR BUSINESS’S 2014 BUDGET Presented by CRM Switch | www.crmswitch.com For many businesses, the start of a new year means a brand new budget. Employees, managers, executives — everyone has a wish list of things they want in 2014. So what’s on your business’s wish list for this year? Is a new CRM system on it somewhere? If your organization doesn’t have a modern CRM solution currently in place, it should be. With today’s rapidly evolving B2B and B2C marketplaces, the conversation about CRM in many businesses today has transformed from “do we need CRM?” to “which CRM system should we buy?”. For those of you out there still wrestling with the former question and not yet the latter, here are some reasons to get onboard the CRM bandwagon: CLINGING TO LEGACY SYSTEMS IS EXPENSIVE If your business is hanging on to an outdated, underperforming CRM system or contact manager, it could end up costing more in the long term than switching over to a modern cloud-based solution. The sales process is becoming more social, customers are expecting a variety of support channels, and management is increasingly expecting more sophisticated reports and sales intelligence. So having a connected, cloud-based CRM is rapidly becoming more of a necessity than a luxury in the business toolkit. BUYING CRM IS A BETTER INVESTMENT THAN COMMON ALTERNATIVES If your company does start shopping around for a new CRM solution, it’s easy to get scared by sticker price shock and awe. Even large enterprises with a healthy budget for business software sometimes get cold feet before making the commitment to CRM. But the alternatives that businesses sometimes turn to are usually much worse options. Things like Excel, Outlook, underfeatured contact managers, and even more primitive options can seem attractive at first glance, but really should be avoided by any business that’s serious about sales development and customer service. CUSTOMER DATA WILL BE SAFE & AND ALWAYS BACKED UP SECURE For those out there who are still wary about this whole “cloud computing” thing–rest assured that your customer data is very safe and very secure. Between redundant backup data centers, encrypted transmissions, two-factor authentication, and a whole host of other anti-hack and anti-data loss measures, today’s CRM vendors are providing security as good, and usually far better, than most businesses can supply on their own. MOBILE ACCESS TO CUSTOMER DATA IS IMPORTANT With the recent explosion of smartphones, tablets, and ultralight laptops combined with the ubiquitous access to WiFi and high speed cellular data, today’s workforce is more mobile than ever. Having access to customer data on the go via either a mobile or desktop cloud application is becoming a standard feature in CRM vendors product offerings. But some vendors are already much farther along than others. By empowering your sales and service teams with access to customer data from any location, it will make them more effective. Companies that cling to systems that don’t provide full-featured mobile access will feel the sting of this omission sooner rather than later. IT CAN BE CONFIGURED AND CUSTOMIZED TO YOUR BUSINESS’S NEEDS One of the greatest advantages that today’s cloud CRM applications offer over their older, on-premises counterparts is the ability for a business to extensively customize and augment their solution via in-application development and third party add-ons from dedicated app marketplaces. Whether it’s more powerful quoting and forecasting, marketing automation, ERP integration, advanced email tracking, or something else–enterprise cloud CRM can be molded to fit your company’s unique business processes. YOUR CUSTOMERS WILL THANK YOU FOR IT Your customers probably won’t know (unless you tell them) that you’ve switched to a new CRM solution, but they’ll thank you for it indirectly. By implementing a CRM solution that meets your company’s needs, you’ll empower your business to provide improved marketing, sales, and customer service to your prospects and customers. They’ll reward you with more leads, closed deals, improved customer satisfaction, and things go according to plan. ultimately higher profits if So, even though that company retreat to Maui that’s penciled in would be pretty awesome, CRM will pay dividends for years to come. (And you can always go to Maui next year.) We hope you enjoyed this presentation. Visit CRM Switch for additional CRM articles, comparison reports, and buying guides.