Do I need a CRM for my startup?
This is a top question I receive literally every time I come across friends who are looking to start a business or running a startup.
“Does your business have customers?” is my usual feedback to them. “then why don’t you need a system to manage your customer relations?”
CRM Setup in a Flash
The next natural question is whether Salesforce is only meant for bigger businesses.
The answer is no. As the founder of our Hong Kong business and back then the only staff member of a startup company, I have loved Salesforce CRM. Many of my clients who run a one person business (initially) also share the same love. One simple reason – Salesforce is so easy to set up because it is all out-of-the-box and you could get yourself up and running in just a day.
For me, I managed to build one environment and migrate a couple of years’ worth of data within a weekend (don’t ask me why) and on Monday, I was already able to run sales reports. There was no disruption on business at all and I saved money and time yelling at developers.
Analytics Made Easy
Data visualisation is a powerful feature of Salesforce. You can easily produce interactive and real time charts and reports to help you with you data analytics and making decisions prompty. For our company, we literally use 10 charts looking at only the pipeline in different dimensions and angles. All these can be done by a few clicks, saving us hours creating Excel manually. Neither I nor my sales team write or understand coding, and yet we’re able to perform advanced business analytics easily.
Enhancing Productivity
Salesforce’s standard out-of-the-box package comes with many other cool features and tools. For example, the Salesforce mobile app allows you to access and manage your customer accounts on the go. Salesforce’s Appexchange is an application marketplace, offering tons of tools to help improve your Salesforce capabilities. One app that my company finds valuable is a document generation app, which allows us to generate proposals, invoices, and receipts straight from our Salesforce account. It’s such a lifesaver for us and many other startups which struggle with manpower to deal with documentation.
Does That Cost a Fortune?
Hopefully you’re convinced by now. But does it cost a fortune to implement Salesforce for a small business?It of course depends on what you are comparing with. If you are a coffee addict and care more about your daily cup of artisan coffee than your customers, Salesforce maybe a bit farfetched as an investment option.
If you believe cloud applications Xero or Gsuite are a good buy, Salesforce is certainly a worthy investment. When I first began my business, I also used all these tools and they cost me nothing more than a decent dinner each month.
Salesforce’s subscription pricing also makes it extremely flexible and scalable. I have saved money an initial setup costs such as servers, IT infrastructure, and firewalls, you name it. I also don’t need to worry about downtime and security of the system since it is operated in a “multi-tenancy” environment, which means I share the same level of service with large corporations who spend big bucks on Salesforce. I feel like money well-spent.
Kickstart Your Customer-Centric Business
At the end of the day, you want to run a customer-centric business and using Salesforce might just be one of the best decisions for your startup. Come speak to us to learn more about how Salesforce can get you started.
