A sales CRM is a must have business tool today. With the increasing number of brand touchpoints today, keeping track of data through traditional tactics is just time-consuming and prone to errors – errors that can lead to missing business opportunities that grow revenue.
Now free sales CRMs make the entry point to this business tool easier for small businesses, considering how resource-sensitive they often have to be.
In this post, we’re going to discuss why it is actually a good idea for small businesses to start with a free sales CRM.
The Unique Challenges of Sales for Small Businesses
Most small businesses are running on bootstrapped budgets or lean investments. This results in the following sales challenges:
-Limited budgets for sales tools and software – Small businesses mostly have the budgets to hire the skills required to make sales; which leaves them with low to no budgets for tools.
-Small teams juggling multiple roles – Every hire in a small business is focused on ‘doing more’. But as they juggle multiple roles and responsibilities, they often lose sight of the sales pipeline.
-Lack of structured lead tracking and follow-ups – The lack of visibility on the pipeline also results in not being able to track the status of leads or strategize follow-ups. This results in missed opportunities and leaking revenue.
-Difficulty managing customer relationships at scale – Small teams don’t have dedicated resources for managing customer relationships. This results in lack of personalization in communication and also missed opportunities without insight into how their consumer needs are changing.
-Need for quick wins and short sales cycles – Most small businesses need to keep themselves afloat with quick wins. This takes away their focus from long-term strategies, keeping them running from pillar to post continually.
How Free Sales CRMs Address Core Small Business Needs
Now here’s how a free sales CRM addresses these challenges:
-Provide a centralized place to track leads and contacts – A CRM gathers data from all the customer touchpoints and brings it onto one dashboard. This helps give sales pipeline visibility to the team.
-Offer basic automation for repetitive tasks – Free sales CRM like Interakt also come with automation workflows for tasks like immediate follow-up on a form submission, scheduling a call and more.
-Eliminate manual spreadsheets and email follow-ups – The team no longer requires storing data in excel sheets. This makes it easier to enable cross-team collaboration to follow-up in a timely manner.
-Help maintain customer history and communication logs – Free sales CRMs help businesses create customer profiles. This helps them understand their audience needs, preferences and changing requirements faster.
Key Benefits of Starting with a Free Sales CRM
Here’s why most small businesses start with a free CRM for sales:
-No upfront investment – This makes it ideal for bootstrapped businesses to get started with building a technology stack.
-Faster onboarding – Since free CRMs come with basic features, the setup for small teams is faster.
-Learn CRM workflows – Free sales CRMs enable teams to get hands-on experience with the tool before committing to a paid solution.
-Scale operations – The CRM immediately brings more efficiency to the sales processes without adding financial pressure.
-Opportunity to test – Small businesses can experiment with different free tools and compare features before upgrading.
Essential Features of Free CRMs for Small Businesses
When signing up for a free sales CRM, here are the features to look for:
-Contact and lead management – One of the leading features to look for in a free sales CRM is the ability to manage data and categorize it based on defined parameters. Interakt enables this with labels.
-Deal or pipeline tracking – The CRM must give you the ability to track the status of leads across the different stages, and who is handling the conversation with activity logging.
-Channel integration – The free sales CRM must integrate with your key channel of communication. For example, Interakt supports small businesses with a seamless integration with the WhatsApp Business API.
-Task reminders and basic automations – A free CRM must help set up reminders and automations for basic sales processes like follow-ups, information sharing and similar.
-Mobile access and multi-user support – The sales CRM should enable multiple users to access customer data and workflows, at their convenience.
Practical Steps to Implement a Free Sales CRM
Here are the key steps to follow when setting up a free sales CRM:
-Choose a CRM that matches your sales process – Identify the channels and the key steps you follow for sales. If you use WhatsApp for most follow-ups, choose a CRM like Interakt.
-Set up pipelines and stages based on your workflow – Don’t get overwhelmed by what the internet suggests. Create pipeline stages based on your actual workflow; no matter how short it is.
-Import contacts and organize them with labels – If you’ve been managing data across platforms and in spreadsheets, import them into the CRM and label based on key demographic segments.
-Train your team to use key features consistently – Give your team access to how-to guides and videos.
-Review and optimize weekly to improve usage – Continually monitor the adoption, use and the impact on your sales performance.
When a Free CRM is the Right Choice for Your Small Business
A free sales CRM comes with limited capabilities. Here’s when it works for your business:
-You’re just starting and want to test CRM workflows
-You have a small sales team with limited technical skills
-Your lead volume is manageable without advanced tools
-You’re focused on core features like tracking and follow-ups
-You want a lightweight, flexible system to grow into
Conclusion
A free CRM is a good place to start for small businesses. It’s a way to get into the habit of streamlining your workflows, how you store data and monitor the progress of your sales pipeline.
But we do highly recommend setting yourself up for success by choosing a tool that can scale with you and is trusted by small businesses.
If you’re looking for a reliable partner, get started with Interakt today.
