A Google search for “CRM app” ends with 158,000,000 results! Yikes! How on earth is someone supposed to wade through all the material and decide which CRM is best for their personal needs?
What does CRM actually mean?
Customer relationship management, CRM, is the art of running your business with regards to your leads and customers. Your CRM system or CRM app is generally some platform for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. The goal is obvious. Managing your business as efficiently and effectively as possible, hence there forth increasing your revenue.
What is CRM strategy?
If the CRM app is a physical platform used to manage leads and customers, the strategy is how you put that system to use. It involves the programs and activities you use to leverage those leads and customers into revenue. The theory is the more you nurture the leads and customers the more business you’ll be able to generate.
Do you attack a lead the moment they leave their information? Do you keep them on a mailing list even after they say they aren’t interested? In theory a company should first design their CRM strategy and only after looking for the right CRM app which suits their needs.
CRM modules
CRM apps can help manage different areas of your business. For example you might have a CRM module for customer support and another one for customer acquisition. Each CRM module needs its own separate strategy. What works for customer acquisition might not work for customer support. Your CRM app should be flexible enough to deal with different modules for different target groups.
A CRM app which does it all?
Is there really such a thing as the perfect CRM app? In our estimation, most probably not, unless you’ve designed it yourself to do exactly what you want, but even then, the moment your CRM strategy changes you have to adapt the same changes in your CRM app.
Ideally businesses look for a CRM which offers the greatest amount of flexibility in terms of managing their leads and customers, so if their strategies change, the CRM app doesn’t have it.
Which one should I choose?!
Well obviously at Calls.AI we’re a little biased, but we do think we have a fantastic CRM app for small businesses who are still managing their leads through excel or paper trails and want to move into something a bit more sophisticated. We’re proud of the fact that our customer base consists of salespeople, real estate agents, freelancers, lawyers, and designers.
Most importantly is that we also listen to our customers! If you have an idea for improving our CRM app, drop us a line and we’ll get right on it!
