A right CRM can help you build your small business effectively and efficiently. It’s a very tricky, difficult and wise decision to pick a CRM for small businesses. CRM will help you to store and record your customers information, track leads, help in marketing management, find sales opportunities, navigate customer behaviors and help you to improve accordingly.
This blog provides a complete guide to why you need a CRM for small businesses, how to choose the right CRM for your small/independent dealerships and how it will help you manage your customers and give you a sigh of relief.
What is a CRM?
CRM for small businesses helps to track, share and upload business interactions with their customers into a single database to make it easily accessible by the business itself. It helps break down lead siloes, and various iterations among the customer data. This helps the business recognize their customer behaviors and new target audiences with similar interests. This helps improve their customer’s experience and recognize buying behavior to break down the target audience.
CRMs enable businesses to track down various touch points including but not limited to emails, social media, calls and also in-person interactions. This makes it easier for the small businesses to create a 360° of the customer behavior and intent to provide the sales and customer support staff to make a more personalized experience for the customer.
10 Factors to Consider for CRM for Small Businesses
Supposedly as a small car dealership with a small sales team, you need to make sure that the productivity is streamlined according to the tasks and goals aligned. CRM system helps organize customer data, lead IVR calling, data entry and form strategies for customer interaction.
In small car dealerships where customer experience determines the majority of sales, expectations are at an all-time high. Your instant reaction to customer requests/inquiries, engaging with customers effectively and anticipating customer needs is what CRM helps you achieve to give you an edge over your competitors. Here are top 10 small business CRM adoption reasons for your small car dealership:
Knowing your Customers
Knowing your customers is the #1 step to retaining them. The more you know about your customers and how they have interacted with your business, the more you can do to provide them with the best service. As a small car dealership, if reaching out to you is easily accessible, you are more likely to convert them and obtain their trust and loyalty towards your dealership.
Tracking and Reviews
With the number of salespeople in your team and new people coming in, every person has his/her own way of selling, making it harder to keep track of data. This may lead to a loss of customers. CRM software helps centralize customer interaction by recording the interaction and monitor it remotely with the help of a database. CRM reviews small business customer data and helps you keep a track of your personnel interaction and performance and choose best practice moving forward with the sale.
Point of Sale/Contact
As a car dealership, there are multiple points of contact with the customers. Some of them are – emails, direct calling, website, in-person sales and more. By streamlining data from various points of contact, you can streamline the data and prospective leads to support the marketing and sales team.
Customer Service and Support
Customer complaints come in all forms and sizes, it can be a straight-up legal reprimand or a small complaint about your car’s performance. However, all this comes down to one common factor – frustration. All these complaints and reviews are necessary to be taken care of in one go. That’s why CRM for small businesses like local car dealerships can help you centralize customer reviews in one database. This data helps you improve your customer service by avoiding repetitive calls from the side of the customer as well as the customer service executive.
Time Saving
As a car dealership, you probably have an excel data sheet where you manually put in all the entries to keep a record of sales and customer leads. However, updating manual systems is a time consuming task and also leads to a lot of human errors. With the help of top small business CRM you can grab customer info easily through lead forms on your website and save it directly into the database. This is a much faster and efficient way to store data with the help of multiple integrations.
Automated Reporting
With the help of best CRM apps for small businesses you can easily automate and filter multiple reports. As the data is collected in a single database, it is easy to form reports and tailor them to recognize customer needs and journey for a better experience. These reports are easily customizable according to the needs of the individual businesses.
Target Audience
With the help of centralized data of your customer information, you can determine which type of customers are more likely to have a positive interaction with your business. You can set up a customer list of customers on the basis of how much they have spent with your business. This also supports your sales team by knowing who to sell or upsell and strengthening your relation with customers.
Lead Flow
If your business is growing and it is hard to manage lead inflow or analyze customer data, CRM for small businesses are great at prioritizing. Knowing which customer might be on priority or at the bottom of the funnel close to getting converted helps the sales team know who to prioritize. CRM system provides an in-depth pathway of the lead flow and can iterate different ranks, and orders by filtering different leads.
Scale your Operations
If you are looking to scale your operations, CRM is the right fit for you. CRM for small businesses helps onboarding more staff with low overhead trainers. As the process is centralized, your team just needs to understand a single dashboard. This helps you scale your operations with ease and bring out the most potential without overwhelming your existing staff.
Complex Sales Cycle
With online marketing, on-road sales team, in-house sales, offline car dealerships, multiple departments and third-party car dealerships you need to have a streamlined communication in order to avoid miscommunication among multiple teams and departments within the dealership. This makes it easy to manage tasks and help set up reminders for dealerships.
Steps to Help You Choose a CRM for Small Businesses
When choosing the top small business CRM, you need to consider multiple factors before selecting the right one for you. Here is a step-by-step checklist to make the right decision and not miss out on a scalable opportunity with CRM for small businesses.
1. Budget: Cost of CRM varies from free tools to 1000 USD per month. Understand your budget and search for the perfect CRM system accordingly. Spyne.AI is an affordable option to consider and it is one of the best CRM for small businesses crafted specially for car dealerships and smoothening the automotive industry’s customer management system.
2. Features: You need to consider the features that you are looking for and the features available in the market for a CRM system.
3. Feedback and Reviews: Reading the customer reviews regarding the CRM for small business that you are looking to partner with helps making a sound and trustable decision. A valid feedback across multiple channels helps ensure that the feedback is truthful and then you can make the decision accordingly
4. Demos and Free Trials: Majority of the CRM businesses such as that of Spyne, usually provide a free trial of their cutting-edge CRM software to small to medium sized car dealerships and other automotive industry businesses to provide a first-hand experience of the software before you decide to move forward with the purchase.
How CRM Can Help Your Small Business Grow
CRM is the stepping stone to help your business grow. As a small car dealership, you might have a lot of local based customers. However, with time you are expanding your business, going online, researching new markets and more. CRM is the right choice for you to support you in this journey.
CRM for small businesses help streamline communication among expanding personnel numbers, departments. In addition, it helps integrate various data sources to help you streamline customer and other data-points in order to drive key analysis with the help of AI generated reports and filters to support your market research and target the right set of audience.
Conclusion
Every business has unique needs and the top small business CRM provides all those features fulfilling the user’s needs. However, the steps mentioned in the above blog must be kept in mind to choose the right CRM for your business and the right fit for the industry you are working in.
Moreover, when used in the right way, CRM can prove to be the ultimate asset to help you scale your operations and reach higher goals as a small dealership firm and compile a new set of customers and improve your conversion rate. So choose wisely!
  
