Benefits of CRM for Startups and Small Businesses
If you're reading this article, there's a good chance you know that every startup and small business needs a CRM to manage their entire Go-to-Market (GTM) organization.
But looking at the reasons you are evaluating a new CRM will help you identify the right tool for your business - whether that is Salesforce or not.
Data Strategy
For starters, it's a question of which teams within the company you plan to use this tool. Are you looking at solutions that just provide CRM functionality for your Sales team? Are you looking at a CRM in addition to Marketing Automation platforms that will be integrated with your CRM? Perhaps you are looking at bringing every GTM team into a single application, which would include Customer Support, Account Management, and Client Services as well as Sales and Marketing.
The reason this matters is because some vendor can only provide a tool that addresses one of these areas, which will leave you looking at multiple vendors to fill the gaps.
Regardless, you want to think about the company's data strategy. This is the process by which you move customers through every touchpoint with your business, from Marketing activities during lead generation, to sales activities during prospecting and demos, through post-sale retention activities with Customer Support teams.
You will manage and build better relationships with your customers by using a single source of truth for all of your interactions with the ultimate goal of increasing revenue for your business.
Scalability
Using a CRM like Salesforce helps with the scalability of your GTM operations. And Salesforce does it better than pretty much any other vendor on the market. Since Salesforce spent so many years catering to Enterprise organizations, they understand the complexity that comes with scale - tools like Hubspot and Zendesk can be great in the early days because they are easy to setup and simple to use; however, companies often outgrow these tools when they need more functionality.
Workflow Automation
Thousands of powerful tools exist specifically for B2B organizations that want to automate workflows and increase the productivity of Sales, Marketing, and Support teams.
Regardless of which CRM you select for your startup, you will absolutely integrate other tools that add powerful features and functionality not available in the core CRM offering. This is a benefit that all CRM vendors will offer, whether it's Hubspot, Salesforce, Zendesk, or Pipedrive.