Best Free CRM Software for Growing Business

How do I start growing my business?

Four steps to business growth

What is CRM used for in business growth?

How do I know CRM is right for me?

Optimiser’s free CRM

 

Business growth is something every business owner considers and struggles with. CRM software is the modern miracle solution that managers use to enhance processes across the entire company scope: from the bottom line to contact nurturing, it allows you to build a stronger sales cycle and grow your business.

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How do I start growing my business?

Business growth is a combination of customer onboarding, providing an excellent CX, and nurturing existing customers. When considering how to begin your business growth journey you should take steps to improve every part of the customer’s journey across your company.

 

Take a step back and view your customer funnels and touchpoints from a third party perspective. Identify the high customer drop-off points, incorrectly looped sections on the lead journey, and where your most lucrative customers are coming from.

 

In the beginning, you should never be afraid to experiment, analyse and develop in order to bring about better results every time until you find something that works for you.

 

“Failure is not to be feared. It is from failure that most growth comes,”

• Dee Hock

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Four steps to business growth

Step 1

To start, your marketing activities should build up interest and activity on your bottom line. Your audience and potential leads will be making shallow interactions across your online and physical brand touchpoints, like your website and social media accounts. 

Step 2

Moving up the sales funnel, you need to optimise the UX and onboarding process. Handle more leads more efficiently and prioritise the more promising leads to save time and have a higher ROI from your onboarding and funnel.

Step 3

Nurturing your existing customers is the quickest and easiest way to grow your business using fewer resources. Counterintuitively, on average onboarding a new client is 10x more expensive than retaining an existing one, so it is vital you have a system in place that helps your reps prioritise existing clients over onboarding new ones.

Create strategies that focus on customer nurturing, for example using a regular newsletter or mailing list to keep them in the know about company events and news. 

Step 4

Make sound, data-led analytics for growth. By understanding the needs, wants and interests of your customers, you can better develop your services and/ or products to meet those needs.

Once you have gained strong, data-led insights into the browsing and purchasing habits of your audience, you are also better equipped to enhance the user journey, make more conversions, and personalise your services in order to retain higher numbers of existing clients. 

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What is CRM used for in business growth?

There are four key areas of business growth where CRM makes the most difference when implemented. When looking for a CRM provider in order to grow your business, these are the

Audience insight

Audience insights are some of the most important pieces of information a business can have for growth. By understanding your audience metrics: 

• Who they are
• Where they are
• How they arrive in your pipeline
• What their interests are
• Why they are showing an interest in your business specifically 

You can turn that into specific actions or sequences across your business, from customer experience (CX) to marketing and sales strategies.

For example, you identify five different type of customer response to your email campaigns:

• They buy every new product immediately
• They only buy products related to a certain interest niche
• They only buy when you offer a discount
• They open the email but do not purchase anything
• They do not open the email at all

You can tailor five different campaigns and use your CRM data to segment groups of people for easy targeted communication. 

Marketing

When collecting knowledge about your customers using your CRM tool, one of the most effective uses of this information is in your marketing efforts. By organising your data according to custom audience segments, you can identify groups according to which product or service they like best, what they are looking for, which of your communication methods gains the most engaged response, and areas in which you are not meeting these requirements. 

Integrated email marketing tools allow you to take and implement CRM insights into your campaigns: send personalised messaging and make the most of opportunities for upselling or proxy sales.

CX

Studies have found that just one negative customer experience is enough to put a customer off repeating custom with a business. Similarly, studies show that excellent customer service is more of an indicator of customer loyalty than value-saving in products and services.

Investing in your customer experience is a great way to retain steady and reliable business growth, and it begins with using CRM insights to find out how and why customers are reaching out to you.

With this information, you can invest resources into improving certain channels of communication, whether that is developing a new phone service strategy, or extending the customer service hours on your website live chat box. Improving CX begins with understanding your audience’s wants and needs, which is exactly what CRM can do for your business.

Productivity

CRM increases productivity by reducing the amount of input a rep needs to put into completing a task while making it more likely a sales or marketing activity will have a high ROI. According to a study, sales reps found 65% of their time was spent on tasks other than selling, including routine and manual data handling.

By providing reps a tool that generates key analytic reports and easy to read graphs and charts, you save time and financial resources wasted on admin work.

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How do I know CRM software is right for me?

CRM software is right for any business looking to make rapid and consistent growth movements in their industry. Often considered a customer relationship management essential, the software encompasses a range of tools but almost always includes:

• Calendar
• Pipeline
• Contacts
• Accounts
• Analytics

You may be thinking, “I already manage all the processes that these tools do manually and get along just fine”. That may be true, but CRM tools collect, clean and analyse your customer data much faster and more efficiently than you could ever hope to manually. With CRM tools falling ever more into what is considered “essential” business software, it is increasingly likely that you can find a CRM provider to suit your budget, no matter what sort of business you have.

• Calendar
  • Cloud-based digital organiser. Perfectly designed for collaborative workflows, scheduling meetings, and onboarding 
• Pipeline
  • Improve the sales funnel by managing multiple ongoing leads at once using a clean and intuitive pipeline tool
• Contacts
  • Detailed list of important contacts containing personal, contact, professional and “offline” information
• Accounts
  • Your accounts, their purchase history and company details
• Analytics
  • Understand key business metrics in clean and simple reports to guide smart growth strategies

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Optimiser’s free CRM

Try Optimiser’s powerful CRM with integrated solution suites for a 30 day FREE trial. Find out how much you can boost your business growth with the best free CRM provision on the market in just one month. The full Enterprise Licence allows your business to create unlimited user accounts, and use the fully-integrated CRM modules: Sales Suite, Marketing Suite, Project Management, Cloud Computing, Lead Management and Event Management.

Optimiser is a comprehensive CRM software company, providing businesses a customisable solution to their personal goals for sales, productivity, and growth. Powerful integrated modules include lead management software, a B2B sales toolkit, automated marketing suite and more for sale under a single subscription. Try Optimiser’s CRM software demo with access to the full Enterprise Licence FREE for 30 days, and find out how you can skyrocket productivity in just one month!