Small business owners need all the help they can get. And that’s not because they’re incapable of running a successful business. Anything but! The issue is they often have their hands in a number of different projects, which can hinder their ability to streamline processes and grow their company quickly.

A customer relationship management tool (CRM), such as NetSuite or Microsoft Dynamics 365, can act as a personal assistant because it allows them to focus on obtaining and converting more leads. 

1. Easier marketing
Is marketing supposed to be easy? Is “easy” even the right term to use? We think so, and here’s why: The more businesses make complex and time-consuming marketing processes simple, the more efficient their employees will be. 

A CRM solution allows marketing employees to better organize their data so they can access a wealth of important metrics with a few clicks of a button. Imagine trying to manually shift through old records and invoices just to gather customer behavioral statistics? This would take too long, and considering business landscapes change constantly, a company’s marketing campaign could be obsolete before they even run it.

2. Improves communication
While office silos may be more common in big businesses that have a number of departments, they can still exist in smaller companies. Organizational silos are basically groups of employees that – for some reason – develop their own systems which are cut off from their peers. Information fails to flow evenly from one department to another, which hinders collaboration and growth. 

A fully integrated business resource management solution that includes CRM like NetSuite or Dynamics 365 Business Edition can completely eliminates silos, allowing employees from multiple departments to access the same type of information. By essentially opening up the information dams, data flows freely from one end of the company to another, allowing managers and owners to make more informed decisions about how to complete goals. 

3. Gain insights immediately
Small business owners have a lot to think about. Between client relations, sales, marketing, employee management and financials, there’s often little time to manually extract and evaluate data. 

A CRM solution removes the manual part from the extraction process, allowing SMB owners to quickly gather important customer data from one user-friendly platform. This enables them to make key decisions about how to approach their existing customer base and reach out to new ones. 

Take for example NetSuite. This powerful cloud solution allows a company’s sales team to pull real-time records of each lead so they can quickly pull up prospect information and close sales quicker.

4. Expand quickly
One reason small businesses struggle to expand is simply because the key decision makers can’t focus on what they do best. CRMs allow employees to focus on their jobs instead of laborious activities such as data collection, storage and extraction. 

Take for example, a small business owner that leads a team of sales people. A sales person’s job often goes beyond just selling a product. They have to record relevant information about the customer. If they use a CRM solution, they can typically record this information in real time, which is then available corporate wide.