Clate Mask, President and CEO, Infusionsoft

Customer Relationship Management software has been around for a long time. It was born in the Fortune 500 world 15 or 20 years ago and has gradually come down stream to smaller businesses. But the average small business with 5 or 10 employees has been slow to adopt (let alone succeed) with CRM software.

Why?

Well, CRM software is fine for bigger businesses with big budgets, big staffs and big chunks of time on their hands to make it work for their business. But small businesses need something different than CRM software. They need automation of their marketing and sales processes. They need the software to do the work of many bodies. They need software that makes it possible to automatically build relationships with prospects, customers and partners. They need software that helps them market more effectively, sell more efficiently and serve customers more proactively. They need software that helps them GROW their businesses quickly and profitably.

The sad fact is, most flavors of today's CRM software are static data warehouses that don't DO much for the small business. These solutions require an individual to log into the software, search for and retrieve information. Heck, we can do that with file cabinets. Today's small business doesn't just need the information digitized, they need automation... and I'm not talking about just automatic report creation. I'm talking about software that will automatically take action on that digitized information. CRM software acts as a data repository so that the business owner or the employees can go fish in the repository and get the information they need to effectively serve their customers. In short, it centralizes and organizes customer information. That’s a very good start, but it’s not enough. My contention is that automation, specifically marketing automation, is what’s needed by small business owners today. They need more of themselves to go around. A data repository is nice, but a robot that executes a marketing plan based on information in the data repository… well, that’s killer.

In talking to tens of thousands of business owners, I've found that most entrepreneurs and business owners want to grow their companies without having to hire a bunch of people--they want fast, efficient growth. They're constantly feeling over-worked and overwhelmed because there isn't enough of themselves to go around. And they're right--there isn't enough of them to get everything done. So guess what suffers? The marketing.