Lightweight CRM software solutions are designed for small businesses and new start-ups to manage customer relationships, nurture promising leads and organize their sales processes. Most CRM software suites are packed with features tailored to increase the productivity of an organization and may not be suitable for smaller businesses.
To address this, lightweight CRM software is created for the main benefit of beginners in the software world. Full-stack CRMs are often costly to begin with and even though they do have myriad features, some of them haven’t been designed for small businesses.
While lightweight CRM solutions do have similar properties to their full-featured counterparts, they are easier to use. They offer user-friendly interfaces and integral features built for smaller organizations.
The most notable lightweight CRM solutions include the following: Salesmate CRM, Mixmax, Pipedrive, Zoho CRM, Streak and many more.
Overall, lightweight CRM software is essential and practical when starting a business. You want to find a cost-effective software solution catered to assist in all of your organizational needs. This can be done through the features integrated with lightweight CRMs.
They enable you to customize sales stages, track the origins of leads, keep basic sales statistics, record meetings in a month, close deals and many more.
Pipedrive offers a simple and intuitive lightweight CRM solution best suited to small teams. At the heart of the solution is a Kanban-style pipeline board that is perfect for teams who want to track and manually manage their deal flow at an affordable price.
Lightweight CRMs are typically used by small businesses and new startups. They were created specifically to handle the needs of a growing business. They’re advanced enough to offer vital features to improve customer relationships but simple enough for newcomers to easily navigate through their interface. With a lightweight CRM solution, you are better equipped to manage several processes all at once.
CRM software targets customer relationships and seeks to optimize the processes behind them. You can customize how your software looks, manage a large customer database and plan certain marketing strategies based on the results of your analysis and statistics.
This gives small business owners the flexibility and scalability to work around the limitations of having a smaller workforce taking care of a growing audience.
Pipedrive is a useful CRM tool geared for small businesses. One of its best features is pipeline visualization, which provides you with a visual representation of your sales pipelines. It’s easy to understand and even easier to edit.
Additionally, many users find Pipedrive’s ability to close deals quickly with certain follow-up reminders a must-have feature to have in their daily operations
With this in mind, lightweight CRM solutions have the following features in their package:
This feature is essential in every CRM software solution. Without it, you wouldn’t be able to improve customer relationships. What this feature includes is a centralized location where all information regarding your customers is kept. This includes their names, emails, contact information, transaction history and much more.
Additionally, it becomes significantly easier to implement and retrieve data, regardless of where you are and what device you’re using to access the cloud.
Managing tasks can be difficult without the proper resources. From its conception through to completion, you need to ensure no mistakes or delays have been made. This feature reduces this risk by offering options and team collaboration to address the state of a task.
Additional notes such as the complexity, status, priority, deadline and notifications can be integrated into each task, allowing for complete control in its entire duration.
Project management is similar to task management but on a larger scale. It means keeping a close eye on the work of a team project. It begins by planning the project, executing the tasks, controlling any abrupt changes and finally closing it at a specified deadline.
This feature enables you to focus solely on meeting the objectives of the clients by making sure the process groups are in sync with one another’s responsibilities.
This feature refers to the ability to manage several sales pipelines simultaneously. Behind each sales process are a series of stages you have to manage effectively to ensure sales revenue. It means staying on top of certain key elements, such as prospect follow-ups, client meetings, task creation and many more.
With sales pipeline management, you become capable of handling the dynamic nature of selling products and services to a wide audience.
Benefits-wise, lightweight CRM software solutions offer the most to small businesses and fresh start-ups. Due to the admittedly expensive full-fledged CRM suites in the current market, many people might not opt for these systems. However, through the most essential features found in lightweight CRMs, even independent business owners can manage the challenges thrown at them.
As such, here are the following benefits you need to consider:
With cloud-based software solutions, updated and recent data is easily accessible to you and your team members. Additionally, fewer mistakes and errors can be made when completing tasks and projects. This is because constant communication is applied in each section of the workforce, letting you share insights and strategies with one another.
One of the most emphasized benefits in CRM software is the ability to automatically update information regarding each factor of your business. This includes but is not limited to customer databases, contact information, sales and order processes and many more. Through this benefit, you don’t have to worry about missing important details as the system updates it for you.
A CRM solution is designed to improve the quality of your business. This means being able to efficiently manage customer inquiries, automate order and sales processes and keep track of all existing tasks and projects. Overall, what you gain in return is an improvement in your sales. This is highly important as this allows your business to grow and thrive, moving from a small company to a mid-sized one.
Overall, lightweight customer relationship management is a valuable asset to any small business. You can use the same tools large enterprises use in their daily operations but at a smaller scale. This ensures that you won’t be overwhelmed by the number of features you can use. In addition, it gives you the time and space to learn how to use software solutions based on your own learning curve.