At the heart of a CRM solution is something called sales force automation (SFA). SFA combined with CRM automates key sales functions so you can accelerate and streamline the sales process.

By putting all your customer information in one place, your team can access it from anywhere — no more spreadsheets, searching through emails, or looking for a sticky note. You can move leads through your sales team quickly and easily. That’s the power of customer relationship management.

The right CRM solution can give you access to contact databases that can be filtered to find your ideal prospects and decision makers within a company, provide social data on those contacts, and deliver insights into what customers are talking about.

This makes territory planning and white space analysis much easier. A complete CRM solution also helps companies run and track marketing campaigns, including marketing communications and delivery automation, and can even help create forms for lead capture and track performance.

For leads that are not sales-ready, you can automatically put them into a nurture track so that when you do call, they are more likely to buy.

With solutions that range from self-help pages (that allow agents to focus on the tough cases) to full call centres, CRM brings immense value to customer service teams.

Your service reps can use it to generate service tickets and keep track of all your customers’ contact with your service department. And because the entire system is connected, account reps and every other relevant department will be fully aware of customers’ issues, so everyone can be a service agent when needed.

Insights about customer service issues can be shared and added to a knowledge base so that agents can help customers even faster. This kind of connected service shortens case resolution time, makes agents happier, and drives customer loyalty and referrals.

If you’re still not sure if your small business would benefit from CRM, here are some signs that it might be time to explore a solution:

• You have teams that work closely together, even when they are not physically together.
• Your sales teams are often on the road.
• You are unable to quickly find customer data to make decisions fast.
• You feel deals are falling through the cracks because you’re managing things in spreadsheets and notebooks.
• You have a patchwork of apps that you call CRM, but they are not really connected on top of a single database or “system of record.”
• Your business is growing more quickly than you feel ready for.
• You know that your customer service experience is lacking or you are losing more customers because of service issues than you’d like.
• You or your IT department is buried with maintenance requests.

• The World’s #1 Choice: With hundreds of thousands of customers and millions of users, Salesforce is a proven choice and the #1 CRM in the world.
• The CRM Cloud Pioneer: Salesforce pioneered cloud computing for CRM in 1999 — no hardware, no software, just sign on and get going.
• Solutions Specifically for Small Business: Salesforce offers packages for sales, customer service, and marketing that work together as one complete CRM solution.
• Automatic Upgrades: Because Salesforce is 100% cloud-based, it delivers three automatic upgrades every year based on customer input, without breaking your customizations.
• Built on Trust: No matter how big or small a business may be, Salesforce technology gives you enterprise-grade security standards.
• A Solution that Will Grow with You: Salesforce offers an extendable set of tools — from preintegrated business apps on the AppExchange to point-and-click tools to build and customize your own apps — so you get what you need, when you need it.