The benefits of CRM software, range widely. The right CRM will improve your ROI, help you to close more sales and optimize your efforts to market your emails. At the same time, a CRM can also help you save another valuable resource in multiple areas of your small business. Here are 4 set up tips for your CRM that can help your business save significant time and optimize its everyday processes.

1) Feed-in Social Information

Naturally, especially your sales department should know as much information about your prospects as possible. The more you know, the more informed the sales pitch can be, leading to greater closeness and higher success rates. Choose the right CRM software for entrepreneurs, and you will be able to feed in social media information for all of your prospects. Now, you can get information that goes far beyond what you collected on your sign up forms, simply by allowing the platform to match email addresses with existing social media profiles. That, in turn, saves you the time it takes to collect that information on your own.

2) Build Automated Nurturing Workflows

A plethora of statistics and studies suggest just how important lead nurturing has become in optimizing your marketing and sales strategy. If you nurture your leads through effective and relevant emails, you will convert them at greater rates and with greater averages purchases. Nurturing leads manually, of course, is close to impossible thanks to the time it takes to set up and send individual emails. The right CRM, on the other hand, allows you to build automated email nurturing workflows that trigger off newly generated leads, and send out relevant messages at pre-determined intervals. All you have to do is wait for the lead to slowly become qualified for the sales call.

3) Set Up Task Notifications

We all know how important notifications can be in saving time in our everyday lives. If we don’t have to go out and constantly check whether it’s time for a given task or meeting, we can focus our attention on other to-dos, allowing that information to flow to us.

In a CRM with an integrated calendar, that hypothetical scenario is easily possible. All you have to do is set up a task and meeting notifications. Like the email workflows outlined above, you can even set them up to trigger automatically, allowing you to follow up with leads once they hit a certain life cycle stage without performing the reporting necessary to find the right spot.

4) Integrate Across Devices

Even if your marketing and sales team spend the majority of their daily work time at their computers, chances are they will be pulled in a multitude of directions. With CRM software for entrepreneurs that are integrated for multiple devices, you can minimize that problem. Now, everyone who needs access to your contact database, calendar, or other features can simply check their phone or any computer that’s easily available when they need to. This immediacy, naturally, will save the time it would otherwise take to be limited to a single computer for each user.

Of course, not every CRM solution allows you to take advantage of all of the above features. That’s why choosing a platform that helps you save time and improve your business processes is crucial.

Ultimately, you need to find a CRM that matches your business goals and processes as closely as possible. At the same time, especially as a small business, you don’t want to spend big bucks for a platform that is both complex and includes features you may never need.

Opting for the right Customer Relationship Management software is just the beginning. To enhance productivity, it is essential to effectively leverage the system into improving customer relationships and generating sales from potential leads. The utility of any system depends on the user. When adopting new software, one needs to educate the associated workforce with its basic functionality. While this may seem like a time-efficient approach, however, in the long run, it hinders the overall potential of the system.

To accomplish maximum success with your Customer Relationship Management solution, here are some considerations to keep in mind.

1. Customize to your suitability

After the choice of a CRM solution, the customization of the software makes the biggest impact on its effective utilization. An efficient CRM Software for entrepreneurs not only allows for accessibility of numerous dashboards for its users but also lets its users create fields such as lists, charts, reports, graphs and so on, as per their convenience. It is essential during customization, to consider the sales and marketing perspective of the system. The software, when tailored to the specific commercial needs of the organization drastically improves its efficiency and makes the system much more convenient for general use.

2. Streamline data for targeted campaigns

One of the biggest hurdles that most organizations face is the storage and utility of the customer information database. A growing company will always experience a shortage of data storage and an overload of data processing. A CRM solution is the most convenient tool to streamline this data for ease of processing and accessibility.

Ensuring that your CRM is up-to-date makes the experience of handling a customer more valuable and also helps in the process of identifying the high-performing clientele of the company. Once identified, the attributes of these customers can then be analyzed and used to target similarly characterized prospects through selective marketing campaigns, thereby fast-tracking the process and generating higher sales.

3. Capitalize on mobile accessibility

With markets becoming competitive day by day, enterprises are having to work hard to meet the demands of their customers. To retain their customers, organizations have to ensure a swift response to queries using customer information at hand, among other facilities.

The CRM software of entrepreneurs comes not only on computer platforms but also on mobile and tablet applications. This means that employees can work from home or field if required or even on the go while pursuing potential leads. Mobile and tablet CRM solutions make communication easier within the company and also with employees out of the office or stationed elsewhere. Finally, make sure to capitalize on your CRM solution by sharing documents as and when needed by co-workers. This may be done amongst employees of similar or different departments. Processing of documents via a CRM solution is not only faster and easier to work with, but more importantly, keeps the data secure within the system.

The productivity of any organization is majorly influenced by the adoption of a multifaceted CRM software, which can however only be thoroughly experienced, by educating the workforce into utilizing its entire potential.