The small and medium business is one that tries to make the most of scarce resources. For the small and medium enterprise, CRM and marketing automation are a must for these reasons:
- Opportunities: When it comes to spreading the word about your business, you would first and foremost turn to the world wide web – such is the level of digital evolution in the commercial sense; such is the place we have reached in the past decade or so. Yet, being online with your small and medium sized business comes with its own set of challenges. To begin with, when you are putting yourself on the digital map, your marketing efforts would generate signals that reach an amplified audience as compared to the traditional forms of marketing. The job of a CRM platform or Agile CRM alternatives is to capture this data and automate the tasks that revolve around taking these opportunities and putting them through the sales pipeline in order to make conversions – or simply put, to make a sale!
- Information: The storage of the vast information available for the use of sales conversions, is of primary importance for the small and medium sized business where the human resource element is at a premium. The job of the CRM system or the alternatives to Agile CRM would be to not only collect and store this information, but to organize it into niches, products and services as well as the various stages in the lead generation, nurturing and conversion process. How will this help the small and medium enterprise? Well, for starters, when the information is required during the call up or fulfillment of a certain task in the sales pipeline, the CRM system will be able to show the relevant information required along with all the interaction that has happened with the said customer or prospect. This will further show what action is to be taken next, and it will greatly help in organizing the work within the sales pipeline.
- Team Work: In small and medium sized businesses, the human element is always at a premium. It is not always possible to hire and maintain large teams. But even with small teams, it is imperative to find a way to make the most of the people who are working within the sales and marketing team. The best way to do is to organize monotonous tasks in a way that does not hamper the team spirit or productivity. This can be done easily with a CRM platform or an alternative to Agile CRM. When each task is etched out and automatically floated once the previous task is completed, there will be better collaboration between the team members which would further lead to higher productivity and better conversion rates at the end of each sales pipeline.
Apart from these three major reasons, there are many others that can prompt small and medium sized business owners to look for Agile CRM alternatives, but let us first understand why the need for such an alternative would appear. To begin with, Agile CRM is one of the best known in the world. Yet, many small and medium sized businesses may find it expensive and difficult to setup as well. Hence, we need alternatives to Agile CRM. Some of them are as follows:
- EngageBay: This would have to be one of the best alternatives to Agile CRM thanks to the fact that it has a full suite of services that go from marketing automation in the areas of email, SEO, social media, landing pages and much more. This element of marketing automation has been successfully married with the CRM function to ensure that the functioning is extremely smooth for small and medium sized teams within such businesses. Further, it is extremely affordable with many plans for smaller businesses and also easy to setup with constant support when one needs it.
- CampaignMonitor: With campaign monitor, you get a CRM platform that helps you track lead generation programs primarily through email marketing and landing pages so that you can thereafter create relevant campaigns to drive engagement.
- Moosend: This is one of the email marketing based CRM platforms that helps you design templates and tracks emails as well.
- Aweber: Aweber allows you to send emails that can be tracked and analyses even as you choose to design campaigns from their main templates.
- WishPond: Wish Pond is a popular platform that combines CRM with lead generation functions that revolve around email marketing.
From the above analysis it is clear that amongst all the Agile CRM alternatives, EngageBay offers you the best deal for each dollar spent!