SaaS is rapidly becoming the preferred choice for businesses of all industries and sizes – in the US alone, about 80% of final users prefer using SaaS applications.
For SaaS companies, this means a constant battle to stay on top of the increasing demand and ahead of the competition.
In today’s fast-paced world when companies face drastically decreased lead conversion rates if they fail to respond within 5 minutes, availability is everything. Customers are somewhat spoiled and don’t want to wait. Letting them wait will probably give them a reason to go to your competitors, diminishing all your efforts invested in attracting new customers and running effective campaigns.
So, what can SaaS businesses do to increase revenue? Whether you’re looking for a SaaS business for sale or you already own one, you should consider investing in CRM software.
Why SaaS Companies Need CRM Tools
Nearly 65% of companies rate CRM tools as very impactful and for SaaS companies, this is extremely important. Why? Because in SaaS, sales are quite complex. SaaS companies need to sell their product and then work on convincing customers to renew their subscription. This means building a long-term relationship with customers by providing outstanding UX and earning their trust.
CRM software allows SaaS businesses to manage these customer relationships by providing a single centralized location where they can collect customer information. It streamlines operations, automates processes, and facilitates communication with existing and prospective customers.
Here is a full list of reasons why SaaS businesses should invest in a CRM tool.
1. Automate Repetitive Tasks
Spending hours on daunting repetitive tasks prevents you from focusing on what really matters.
A good CRM solution will help you automate such tasks. For instance, you can use it to send the contacts on your email list a series of emails at pre-set frequencies, track these emails, and see if they get read or ignored. Or, you can use CRM to automatically assign tasks to your sales team.
2. Manage Data More Efficiently
Collecting data in your current and prospective clients is easy, but all that information needs to be properly organized so that you can make use of it. A good CRM solution provides a centralized location that every employee can easily access and use it to communicate with customers in real-time. Every single interaction your company had with customers and prospects is safely stored to enable smoother communication. Your CRM tool will allow you to check when a certain prospect was last contacted, provide conversation notes, and scheduled activities – all with an aim to help you make better decisions.
3. Take Control Over Sales
A good CRM tool will help make your sales process faster and more efficient by providing a sales pipeline for your business and letting you know where exactly your prospects are in the buying process. You can even use it to create multiple sales pipelines in order to manage the sales processes for customers from different industries.
4. Use the CRM to Make Global Calls
Many of today’s CRM solutions come with built-in phone systems enabling you to make calls from a single platform. You can log, track, and record these calls automatically, add notes during sales calls, create calling reports, and collaborate with remote teams more efficiently. Besides increasing your team’s efficiency and productivity, a CRM solution like this will also save you money as you won’t need to invest in a separate call software.
5. Create Detailed Reports and Gain Valuable Insights
CRM tools allow you to create insightful reports and get valuable metrics to help you reduce churn rates and close more deals. By creating reports in CRM, you’ll be able to determine the average revenue per user, understand which stages of the sales process might be problematic, identify risks and figure out the best measures to be undertaken in order to eliminate any obstacles, track the number of deals your sales team is closing every month, etc.
6. Cheap, Hussle-Free, and Secure
Investing in CRM doesn’t exactly require breaking the bank, so even small and medium-size businesses can afford it. CRM software is completely hassle-free as it doesn’t require installing any hardware, setting up a server, or hiring an IT expert to maintain it. Most CRMs also have customizing features allowing the software solution to be customized and modified according to your business needs. Finally, all the data stored in a CRM tool is completely secure.
What Are Your Options?
You can choose to invest in a specialized CRM tool that is best suited for SaaS. Tools like Hubspot CRM and Salesforce CRM perfectly cater to the needs of small tech start-ups, helping them to build and maintain relationships with their customers.
Another option is to use Excel. Excel templates incorporate CRM functionality to help you analyze and manage customer data. Like any other type of template in Excel, these are meant to make it cheaper, faster, and simpler for you to gather and make sense of data. Of course, this would be a solution unique to your enterprise, so you might want to consider using specialized Excel consulting services to get started off the right foot and make it meet the specific needs of your business.
In Conclusion
Choosing the right CRM technology can be very beneficial for your business. If you motivate your sales team to use it regularly, it might turn out to be a small investment that makes a huge difference to your SaaS business.
