3 Steps to CRM Success for Medium-Sized Businesses

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is an essential tool for managing the details regarding every potential or current customer. CRMs centralize all customer data so it’s easy to make contact, understand the current step in the sales process, or understand overall lifetime value — to name a few of the popular use cases.

Before adopting a CRM, organizations tend to rely on spreadsheets, email chains, and third-party calendars to manage customer contact. The result is needing to navigate through several systems just to contact a customer, creating the opportunity for a new lead to fall through the cracks.

As a result, upgrading to a CRM is a crucial step in any company’s growth plans. CRMs have become more affordable and adaptable, encouraging small and medium-sized businesses to adopt them sooner rather than later. 

And there’s a good reason to adopt the right CRM: studies indicate a 50% increase in productivity after a business upgrades to a CRM. Regardless of industry, product, or service, it’s clear that businesses can benefit from centralizing customer information and refining workflows for all customer-facing teams. 

Keep reading to learn more about how CRMs can benefit your medium-sized benefits and how to get the most out of using your new platform.

Top Advantages of a CRM for Medium Sized Business

Why should a medium-sized business take on the added expense of CRM, re-train its workforce, and fundamentally change several key processes?

Even though the change can be daunting, once complete, your entire customer-facing workforce will benefit significantly from automation, customization, and integrations that make their lives easier.

Some of the key advantages of a CRM for medium-sized businesses are:

• Create a single source of truth: Having customer data live in disparate systems reduces productivity, accuracy, and creates the possibility of leads falling through the cracks. A CRM helps medium size businesses create a single source of information used by every department, so regardless of who talks to the customer next, the agent knows about previous conversations.
• Simplified contact management: There are many core processes that involve contact with your customers, leads, or partners. Having the right contact management platform in place gives your employees access to everything they need to provide an amazing experience.
• Benefit from data-driven insights: Your CRM will have a wealth of sales data, which it can then use to generate comprehensive reports and projections. Then, your company will be equipped to use this information to make impactful decisions informed by data to strategically grow the business.

Finding the right CRM for your organization to gain these advantages is vital. You need to ensure it has the right features, then successfully implement your new CRM with existing workflows.

Essential Features of CRM Systems for Medium Business

What specifically do you need to look for in a CRM? Your needs will likely be unique to your business; however, a mid market CRM will have the following features and capabilities:

• Automation options for common tasks
• Comprehensive profile for every customer or lead
• Integrations with your existing platforms
• Ticketing system to track issues
• Pipeline management to keep sales moving
• Easy user management and role assignment

Keep in mind any other features you may need that are specific to your business. An ideal CRM will work for your specific needs.

3 Steps to Successfully Implementing a CRM for Medium-Sized Businesses

Adopting a CRM is crucial for refining any customer-facing departments to minimize wasted time, inaccuracies, and prepare for the next growth phase.

However, you need to carefully select and implement the right CRM to truly reap all of the possible benefits. Otherwise, you may end up with a lackluster solution that doesn’t improve your existing processes.

Let’s review a simple three-step process to finding and deploying the right CRM for your specific needs.

1. Thoroughly Understand Your Specific Needs

What’s the best CRM for medium business? The answer will be unique for every organization, even though some options end up becoming more popular than others. 

It’s crucial to consider exactly what you need from a CRM before you start looking at options. Some elements to consider are:

• What are your biggest challenges in managing customer relationships?
• What are the other platforms you depend on?
• How many customers and leads do you need to manage? And how many user accounts?
• Do you already have refined processes to augment, or do you need to create entirely new ones?

Take a broader look at all customer-facing teams and processes. Understanding the moving pieces, pain points, and inefficiencies is essential. Then, you can start considering different options based on your unique needs.

2. Compare Integrations and Customization

Now that you understand what you need, it’s time to start comparing different CRMs. While pricing is certainly essential, it’s crucial to compare available integrations and customization options to find an option that works for your teams and existing platforms.

Integrations have become increasingly vital as modern businesses rely on an entire tech stack. Your chosen CRM needs to integrate with your tech stack and possibly have an available API for additional integrations.

Customization is also essential for any CRM so that your teams are able to alter dashboards and workflows to better accommodate their individual needs. The right CRM will also provide customizable automation options that allow each individual team to 

Lastly, the right option allows you to buy exactly what you need without paying for capabilities you don’t need. Some CRMs are relatively rigid, while others offer customizable CRM packages. Explore all available options before moving forward.

3. Focus on Processes

The goal of adopting a CRM is to close more sales, increase customer satisfaction, and enhance productivity. Accomplishing these goals requires more than simply signing up for a CRM and telling your employees to use it.

You need to focus on processes at every step of the process. After choosing the right CRM, you need to dive into its capabilities and augment or replace existing processes with it. 

For example, if leads used to be stored in a Google Sheet, they’ll now be within your CRM. How can your sales reps reach out to new leads, monitor progress, and close sales? These steps will look different from your older processes, so you need to develop replacement processes and provide adequate training to your employees.

Take the time to develop new processes alongside providing training to all sales and support teams. Preparing your teams to use the new platform is just as important as choosing the right platform.

Leveraging CRM to Drive Medium-Sized Business Success

You can see how adopting a CRM creates a centralized area for all customer information while also providing powerful ways to enhance productivity and the customer experience.

However, it’s crucial to find the right CRM specifically for your needs. For example, you’ll need the best CRM for customer service if you’re striving to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

It’s also vital to choose a CRM that’s customizable and adaptable, so you aren’t locked into a rigid system that might not evolve alongside your business. The right CRM has a wealth of integrations, is constantly exploring new capabilities, and allows your employees to customize the platform to cater to their workflows.

That’s why Fireberry has rapidly become among the best CRMs for small, medium, and enterprise-level businesses. Our CRM gives you the robust tools necessary to accommodate different departments, merge into your tech stack, and improve processes throughout the operation. 

Is it time for your business to streamline operations and prepare for your next growth phase? Contact us today and see why Fireberry is the right fit for you.