Traditionally, CRM software solutions are large and complex systems designed for large corporations. Because these systems are targeted towards large organisations, they are usually not suited to small business. There have been attempts to target small businesses with these packages, but all in all, most small business continue on without utilising CRM technologies within their business.
Why should small businesses miss out on the advantages of CRM? CRM can increase efficiency within a small business, and this can free up time for staff to be more productive. Because a small business is a lot more transparent than a large corporation, the benefits of CRM software can be more clearly seen.
Usually however, CRM software is created without much thought to how easy it is to use. In a large corporation, ease of use is not normally a high consideration. They have the resources to pay for consultants, training courses and they have a large IT department with any additional expertise needed to keep the systems running.
Because small businesses don't have the same resources as a large corporation, CRM systems need to be quick to implement, require minimal training, be easy to use and deliver transparent benefits to the small business owner as soon as possible.
Our product, Leopard CRM, was designed for the small business in mind, right from the start. Firstly, we designed the interface to be easy to use. Great care has been taken to simplify layout, ask for information only when it's really needed and have minimal mouse clicks to perform regular functions.
Then we looked at the design of the entire system. We could have designed the system to be installable by customers on their own servers, but this creates complexity. Server requirements, hardware, software, web servers, frameworks, database servers, uptime, support, upgrades, planning and many more considerations that a small business would have to take into account in deploying a CRM system.
We decided that the easiest way for a small business to get access to great CRM software would be to host the CRM systems ourselves. You may have seen this referred to as On-Demand or Hosted CRM. That way, we can setup standardised systems that are customised to do one thing only, to deliver fast, reliable CRM services to small business around the world.
The process of designing the Leopard CRM product didn't stop there however. There can be many hidden costs for a business to implement a new CRM system. Most of them can appear when needing to address some of the complications listed above. Not only are hidden costs a concern, but a CRM system can require some heavy capital investment when the system is first implemented. We decided that the easiest way for a small business to get access to a great CRM system is to price Leopard CRM as a monthly payment. This eliminates surprises and means that no large upfront capital expenses are needed to get started.
For more information on how Leopard CRM can make a difference to your small business, please visit the website listed below.
About the author: Dan Harper is the CEO and co-founder of Leopard Software, creators of small business CRM software, Leopard CRM.