Why is my business so quiet?

Many small businesses suffer from a debilitating condition which spawns when the economy is healthy. In a good economy, new businesses start up everywhere, and have the luxury of being able to sit on their hands and enjoy the in-flow of phone calls, website enquiries and referrals.

But for some reason, this same conditioned thinking seems to persist into a slowing economy...... "let's sit and wait for the phone to ring". And guess what? It does not ring.

Three months go by, and the owners of the business are considering their options.The lack of a sales process is a major reason why many small businesses fail within the first 3 years. The lack of a controlled sales and marketing process is a very sure path to the demise of any business.
 

So what is CRM?

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. Using a CRM system is the most connected way to centralise and control the CRM process. A CRM system provides the following:

• aggregating your sales team's collective knowledge into a single point
   
• focusing the attention of sales people so that every time they talk to a customer, there is a entry into the CRM which may be:
  • an opportunity for business immediately
  • the placement of a future call or a meeting
  • any piece of information that would be useful for future reference about a customer
  • the recognition of all opportunities that may have been previously 'post-it noted" or otherwise forgotten in a busy day
  • generating an excuse to call your customer periodically (which surprisingly opens many more doors than is realised)
  • capturing and tracking every lead, assigning it to someone, and following it through to fruition
  • obtaining simple but valuable graphical data such as forecast or actual reports, and seeing this data collectively at a business level, or drilling down to individual sales persons
     
• structuring and grouping your database for sending bulk newsletters mail
   

How can CRM work for my business?

Success with CRM requires a strong grasp of the following fundamental points:

• A habit of CRM must be established in your business to create marketing momentum and connect it to your sales process....
   
• This CRM habit focuses the business and all of its staff so that no single lead or opportunity, however great or small, can slip through the cracks.....
   
• Investing in the CRM process is not seen as a cost to your business but rather a revenue generating process....

Why use SugarCRM?

The SugarCRM system is a high performance real time web based contact management system and has been used commercially for over 8 years all throughout the world by thousands upon thousands of large and small organisations which gives it great distance as a business application.

In addition to its rich model and rock solid foundation, the SugarCRM application also:

• has an extensive library of pre-built add-on modules that you can customise the CRM to suit your business

• can be easily customised by you with its built-in:
  • modules and tabs
  • forms and layout
  • fields and labels
     
• is browser web based so has little to no problems with:
  • geographically spread organisations
  • centralising franchisee data and isolating the data within departments
  • providing remote access networking
  • access from mobile phones

Does This MYOB or Quickbooks count as my database?

The most common small business accounting packages used in Australia are MYOB and Quickbooks.

These do not qualify as CRM as they cannot record rich customer data about calls and meetings, customer notes, sales opportunities with sales stages, tasks, and documents against your customer data cannot be done in your accounts system.

It does not mean that certain data cannot be shared with the CRM, but accounting systems are not usually accessible by the sales team.

How much is SugarCRM and can I pay monthly?

SugarCRM offer a free 1 user stack installer from their website. We encourage curious people to download and try this for free.

Beyond this the fees for the SugarCRM Professional - Enterprise editions from $360 - $1200 per year per user if you require more than 1 user, or if you wish to run it in the cloud for greater performance and mobility.

So in this case, it is more cost effective to run SugarCRM hosted in the cloud with Digital Catalyst.

Using our method keep business costs low because:

• you do not increase hardware requirements or hardware maintenance overhead in your business
• you do not require the extra IT support to maintain these systems
• our system runs on high speed servers design for website applications and email
• SugarCRM system comes included with very comprehensive context sensitive user help documentation to help your business through configuring it
• you can access your customer data and meetings from your mobile

Our fees include a setup fee from $660.00 for your instance.

Our monthly hosting fees start at $44.00 inc GST per month for up to 5 users. If you already have a website hosting account or other hosted service with us, then you will benefit from our bundled hosting deal and your monthly fees start from $33.00 per month (33% saving).

Additional fees will apply for:

• each additional 5 user block
• personalised consulting and training on how to properly implement CRM into your business, and to structure SugarCRM to do that
• additional space on your hosting account over the 1GB space, but most businesses do not require this
  

Contact us now to discuss a SugarCRM solution for your business.