A day in the life of an SME entrepreneur – before and after implementing CRM
An entrepreneur running a small or medium enterprise is expected to be like Superman! He must be able to focus on several things all at once, and get things right the first time. Because the cost of time delays or wrong decisions would be very high. The success of the venture depends on how efficiently the business owner utilizes his working hours and that of his core team.
The business venture could be manufacturing based such as electrical/electronic components, furniture, sanitary ware, textiles and so on. Or it could be assembly, sales and distribution of goods such as mobile phones. Some ventures are purely services and consultancy based such as real estate, financial services. The list is endless. What is common to all types of businesses is the end goal – profitability and success for the company, satisfaction for the customer.
Let’s try and visualize the average working day of one such small entrepreneur. What sort of tasks occupy his time and focus. It is to be noted that the tasks would obviously vary depending on the nature of business. Here the attempt is to generalize to get an overall view. Some of the routine and periodic tasks are listed below.
An Entrepreneur’s typical day in office – Before CRM
Task Name |
Task Description |
% Time Spent |
Getting up to date with the day’s correspondence |
· Emails, post, social media messages · For companies employing multiple communication channels, this activity occupies a considerable amount of time. |
32% |
Team communication |
· Meetings, presentations · Task updates · Trouble shooting |
24% |
Customer facing tasks |
· Meetings, presentations · Marketing · Sales and contract negotiations · Monitoring progress · Problem solving |
20% |
General administration And HR |
· Managing the factory/office premises · Routine bills and salary payments · Employee welfare |
12% |
Core business |
· Product development/service delivery · Supply chain management |
8% |
Financial management |
· Investment and funding · Expenses, taxes |
2% |
Long term focus |
· New product / Business expansion · Mergers and Acquisitions · Enhancing stake holder value |
2% |
We notice some alarming trends from these statistics. More than half of an entrepreneur’s time is spent on over-head tasks such as keeping up with correspondence and team communication!
When analysed in greater depth, a few critical facts emerge:
- There is lot of duplicate, redundant customer communication to sort out
- Top priority and low priority communication gets mixed up
- Collecting data and preparatory work for meetings is inefficient as the customer data required is scattered in multiple locations
- Sorting out payment issues with customers involved plenty of unplanned communication
Many of these customer facing inefficiencies can be eliminated by implementing a CRM solution.
Now let’s introduce a CRM solution implementation into the business venture. Depending on the scale and nature of operations, the company may choose to opt for CRM on a one-time basis or as a monthly SaaS subscription.
CRM solutions come equipped with some critical and effective features that help SMEs increase their operational efficiency multi-fold. How will putting a CRM solution in place eliminate the problem identified earlier, let’s find out.
Before CRM |
After CRM |
Communication inefficiencies and redundancies with customer |
Enterprise-Wide Customer Communications Management Helps to integrate all forms of communication from each customer Prioritize mails and messages, set reminders Data analysis with AI helps to draw valuable insights and patterns from the communication for automated decision making |
Customer payments tracking is a time consuming exercise |
Centralized database for all customers information including their billing and shipping addresses, tax and language preferences and their payment information All employees will have access to the most recent customer data Track customer interactions, see purchase history, and securely store sensitive information |
Delays in handling customer queries and trouble-shooting support |
Unified customer dashboard within the CRM application Gives a quick and complete view of all the pending support issues raised by a particular customer Easy to track and resolve as all the information is present in one place |
By relieving an entrepreneur of these routine and repetitive tasks, a CRM application helps in freeing up a lot of his valuable time. Long term focus oriented tasks such as planning business expansion, handling investments and enhancing stake holder value will now get a lot more of his attention. If you recollect from our earlier time division of his working day, he was barely spending 2% of his time on each of these critical tasks. With CRM in place, the entrepreneur can actually do things he must be doing!
Implementing a CRM solution that is perfectly tailored to suit the particular business venture is a smart move. Go for it!
Most of the popular CRM software providers have tie-ups with service implementation companies, in your own locality. These companies help you pick the right CRM application among the various options. They also ensure the entire CRM adoption in your company.
We at Rixyncs are a leading CRM service provider based out of Bangalore, India. We have been in the business for over a decade and have helped hundreds of small and medium size companies successfully adopt the CRM enterprise business process. As a result, our clients have seen growth of upto 35% in their revenues.
We are global premier partners for vtiger and affiliated partners with all the major CRM providers like SalesForce, Zoho and Microsoft Dynamics. Get in touch with us and we will be glad to give you a demo on how your business could benefit from acquiring the CRM advantage.
Author Profile – Anuradha is a freelance writer cum corporate trainer in the IT/Telecom domain with 20 years of experience. She served in senior technical and management positions in Huawei and TCS for 10+ years. Then gave up the traditional corporate ladder to go solo – in order to escape horrendous city traffic and to be at her own boss!
Leave a Comment