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Customer relationship management, or CRM, is the lifeblood of small companies. By utilizing CRM techniques to understand how customers find a company’s product and how likely those customers are to stay loyal to their brand, businesses can find out what successful products or services they’re offering and what can be changed to help customers even more.
However, parsing through the many factors that make up customer data takes up valuable time and in-depth knowledge of multiple database systems - something that not many human resources and customer retention specialists are well-versed with. To help make this data more accessible to companies, CRM software suites have been developed that pool all relevant data in one spot. One of the most long-standing and fully-featured CRM suites is SAP Business One.
Here, you’ll find some generalizable details on CRM software’s ability to help small businesses maintain relationships and some specifics on SAP Business One’s unique place in this space.
Real-Time Financial Calculations
This CRM software can connect financial data across a range of different parts of a small business to gain a better overall picture of your company’s finances. Financial factors that are primarily dealt with by different employees, like purchasing costs for office supplies versus purchasing costs for essential manufacturing and product goods, can be loaded into the same module within SAP Business One. On top of this, access to various pieces of financial data can then be partitioned to just those who need to see that data, and database connections can be optimized to make data transfer even more seamless.
Opportunity Management
At most small businesses, sales teams usually consist of just a few individuals. With a relatively small team, it can be hard to balance time spent on existing customer relationships with the time necessary for forging new sales opportunities and new relationships. CRM software generally includes lead generation modules and toolsets that allow sales teams to keep track of leads in an organized fashion, with reminders that occur at set intervals after the first contact with a potential lead.
As with financial calculation, SAP Business One allows users to link multiple pieces of data to their opportunity management module. Rather than just assigning an employee to a particular lead, that lead’s email, necessary contact information, financial data, and meeting dates can all be imported into one comprehensive system that allows for a greater understanding of when the opportune pitching moment will be for that lead. Even better, leads can be added using an automated process if sales emails are linked to the software.
Extensive Customization
The SAP Business One software is designed as a series of interlinked modules, each meant to function well independently but even better linked together. By linking together modules, businesses can transmit information seamlessly and gather an integrative view of different business metrics. Along with the Opportunities module mentioned above, some of these modules include:
Material Requirements Planning: Here, businesses can forecast the materials or services that they’ll need in the coming months. This can allow purchase orders to be made far enough in advance that sales members won’t have to stress about low stocks of goods.
Project Management: Large-scale projects can be created and defined here. Sub-modules can be integrated here. For example, the Materials Requirement Planning module can be used to predict necessary goods for that project, and team members can be linked to the project within Business One. By linking team members, calculations for salary proportion allotted to that project can be calculated with ease.
Banking: Company bank accounts can be added securely to the SAP platform, allowing for easy monitoring of inflow and outflow of cash without foregoing information security.
Third-Party Apps: If businesses rely on e-commerce platforms and websites for sales, then syncing those services to Business One can be useful. Within-software integrations like SaturnSync exist to help users do just that, offering integration with outside apps like Slack and Gmail.
Shipping and Declaration Support
In today’s global business world, some customers will likely be from countries that are different from the one where a company is based. Shipping goods to those countries can be a time-consuming problem – creating shipping labels, figuring out shipping taxes and VAT, finding the right import permits, and other issues all come up when shipping internationally. CRM software includes integrative services with templates for all of these issues to help streamline international shipping hassles. For example, Business One includes custom declaration forms for cargo for countries like Russia and other European countries. This ensures that cargo can be placed on the market as soon as it’s released from cargo storage (provided the form is filled out correctly), rather than having to wait for multiple different documents to pass through customs.
CRM services exist to help companies manage all aspects of their business in a more streamlined manner. SAP Business One is one of the most powerful and efficient tools for small and medium-sized businesses around the world. By making work easier, small businesses can curate more meaningful relationships with customers and make a bigger impact on those customers’ lives.
