As a small business owner, you may be thinking, "What does big data have to do with me?" But if you use certain types of business applications, you can benefit from big data even on a small budget. A prime example is a customer relationship management (CRM) system that provides actionable data right in your hands.
What is big data?
Big data refers to the vast amounts of information that businesses collect from online and offline sources. These sources include websites, social networks, mobile applications, software, documents, computer logs, and more. However, this explosion of data is not necessarily because of its size, but because of what it can do.
In simple terms, big data provides various types of intelligence to help businesses make better decisions.
What is a CRM system ?
CRM is the system that businesses use to manage how they work with current and potential customers. It is primarily used by salespeople, usually in the form of a CRM system, to provide a centralized location to store, view, and organize customer information.
While CRM systems were developed to help sales reps be more efficient and spend more time selling, they have become reporting tools for tracking sales pipelines and customer health. When used correctly, CRM can benefit SMBs in several ways.
Benefits of CRM
CRM increases profits for SMBs by helping them close sales and cultivate customer relationships.
When approaching potential customers with new proposals, SMB CRM users will have a wealth of information to arm themselves with. This information includes the benefits of knowing the right contacts, such as decision makers and gatekeepers, to improve the chances of winning contracts with potential clients.
CRM solutions provide sales teams with a tool that helps them close deals. CRM also allows SMEs to have a "bird's eye view" of which potential customers, industries, company sizes, and other targets are most profitable.
They can better focus their efforts based on what the CRM system is telling them and] steer salespeople in the direction that will generate the highest potential profit.
Additionally, a CRM system enables businesses to understand customers better, build trust and provide excellent customer service. Because CRMs collect and store customer information from every interaction, they allow employees to deliver a consistent, high-quality experience every time they interact with current or future customers, with the goal of strengthening customer relationships and loyalty.
All of these benefits are based on information from a CRM system, which seamlessly integrates data from many sources inside and outside the organization. This gives each employee a holistic view of each customer in real time.
How Big Data and CRM Help SMEs?
The connection between big data and CRM is that CRM extracts value from big data. This helps employees understand the who, what, where, when, and why before reaching out to customers.
SMBs can find many types of data through their CRM. For example, employees can collate insights that help them attract and sell new customers. Examples of such data and its uses include:
company name and details, and the correct contacts and decision makers within the company so salespeople know who to target.
Social media information, such as company news – keeps salespeople up-to-date on potential and existing customers.
A history of all interactions with a prospect or customer, making the relationship more personal.
Keeping a history of all projects, opportunities and proposals discussed with prospects enables staff to better understand the prospect's needs and prepare better, more personalized proposals.
Revenue forecasting, based on upcoming opportunities and their potential to turn into profitable projects, so leaders can create sales forecasts.
Having so much data at their fingertips can sometimes be overwhelming for SMEs. The key is to collect only the data you need most and analyze it using the reporting tools in your CRM system.
Gain Actionable Insights with CRM
Incorporating a CRM system, actionable data is available to SMEs everywhere, no matter how small or small. Today's advanced CRM tool, 8Manage CRM, can help SME users by managing and analyzing customer communication and data throughout the customer life cycle.
Understand customer needs: 8Manage CRM system stores contact information such as name, contact type, address, phone number and social media account in a searchable database, which can be used to create personalized marketing campaigns, products and services, To meet the needs of customers.
Simplify the sales process: CRM allows users to standardize workflows and processes related to sales, marketing, and customer support, helping SMEs streamline their sales process by identifying the most effective sales techniques and strategies. This contributes to increased sales and customer satisfaction.
Improved customer service: Having a deep understanding of customers allows sales and support to work together to help customers without interruption, which increases customer satisfaction and retention.
Build customer loyalty: CRM can help SMEs identify loyal customers and create loyalty programs to incentivize repeat business. This can increase customer lifetime value and revenue.
Enhance marketing efforts: The system helps you create targeted marketing campaigns and track campaign planning, campaign execution, and results to increase sales and customer loyalty.
Overall, the data in the 8Manage CRM system can provide SMEs with valuable insights to help them make smarter business decisions, improve their customer interactions, and ultimately grow their business.
By cutting through the noise and extracting small bits of data from big data, SMEs can compete fairly with their larger counterparts in an increasingly competitive global marketplace.