Types of CRMs and choosing the right one for a Startup/Micro Business

Hi and welcome! Thanks for visiting my newsletter where we discuss all things lead generation.

We're going to discuss the different types of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems you find on the market, and how to choose the right one if you're a B2B startup or micro business (in the UK, this refers to a business with fewer than 10 employees and turns over less than ￡1.8 million)

Choosing the right CRM for your needs can be tricky - there are loads on the market but not all are suitable for the stage of business you're in.

This is a crowded market place and so it can be confusing when trying to decide what’s best for your business now.

If that sounds like you, fret not, this artlcle breaks it down for you. Or head here if you prefer to watch a video: types of CRM and how to choose the right one

Types of CRM systems

There are broadly 5 types of CRMs or tools to help businesses keep their contacts in one place, and to track contacts starting from early stage leads, to prospects to clients and beyond.

1)?? Email focused CRMs

Tools such as Mailchimp, Active Campaigns and Constant Contact are great for email nurture, email analytics and will provide campaign automations as well.

These tools will help you capture and organise your mailing list contacts. You can plug them into your website so when someone lands on your website and fills in an enquiry, that contact goes straight to your email CRM

You can set up email automation sequences such as an onboarding sequence, where a new lead comes in from your LinkedIn or website and you put the new signup through a sequence of nurture emails.

Nurture email sequences can be different depending on the recipient's interactions with the emails

2)?? Sales focused CRMs

CRMs such as Pipedrive and Phonexa are good for tracking and measuring your sales pipeline

For me, I use Pipedrive to track my sales conversations as it gives me good insights into my monthly sales KPIs and helps me improve my sales conversions

However I use it to track people and businesses with whom I know are interested in the services I offer, whether now or at a definitive future date. To get to this stage of the sales process, there may be a few steps before we reach the discovery stage of my sales pipeline.

The discovery stage is where I really start tracking my sales conversations with that warm – hot lead. This is where we identify and qualify if a lead is a good fit for us, and so I use a sales focused CRM for this purpose.

You can use sales focused CRMs to track your top of the funnel or early stage leads although these CRMs aren’t focused on lead management or lead analysis, so if you’re looking for a simple hassle free solution to lead management, I’d use a lead focused tool like LeadTracker

3)?? Full Service CRMs

This is where it gets really complicated and noisy. BUT, it doesn't have to be...

All singing all dancing CRMs like Hubspot or Zoho are full service CRMs. They have anywhere from 70 to more than 200 features!

From lead capture, lead nurture to sales pipeline management and more, these powerful systems, if used effectively and consistently, will help your team and ultimately, your business grow

But if we are a startup or micro business, this begs the question: do we need all of these features now or 2-5 years down the road, or maybe never?

Do we have the time, the help we may or may not have or afford, the inclination to go through the training and setup so we can effectively use these systems?

And for what purpose? Don't forget we also need to input, update and manage the data that we capture on a regular basis.

If the answer to the above is no, not now as we have more important and urgent matters to attend to, then these CRM systems aren’t for us - now.

4)?? Vertical Focused CRMs

These are CRM systems tailored to specific industries, such as Bullhorn for staffing and recruitment, Nutri Admin for the health and wellness sectors, or Oracle NetSuite for the manufacturing industry.

These come with workflows specifically tailored to an industry, and can be indispensable for larger or enterprise level businesses with departments / management who rely on the data for their day to day jobs.

5)?? Lead Focused Tools

This is my favourite area as it’s not a well served market, there aren’t many of these tools that are easy to use, affordable and allow you to make strategic decisions on where to focus your early stage lead generation efforts.

LeadTracker, a channel and platform agnostic leads tracking and management tool we’ve developed, is one of them.

We built this tool to tailor to B2B startups and micro businesses as we understand the lead generation challenges they face when trying to acquire new clients.

If you have more than one marketing activity you'd like to measure, and you're selling high ticket personalised services to individuals, LeadTracker works for you as well.

To give it a go, you can sign up completely free, no credit card required and use it for 90 days or up to 30 leads. Or cancel anytime

So there you have it - a quick breakdown of the 5 types of CRM systems in the market. Hopefully this gives you a good overview when you're shopping around for CRMs to try.

To summarise, here's a graphic of where LeadTracker fits in:

With that said, happy CRM shopping! Whatever choice you make, I hope you’ll reap the full benefits of it to help your business generate good quality leads that will turn into great clients!

To your lead generation success ??

Joyce

What's LeadTracker?

We're the creator of LeadTracker, a platform and channel agnostic leads tracking software that helps you track, measure and analyse your lead generation activities so that you/your team will make data driven decisions on your marketing.

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