Many small business owners do not think they need a Customer Relationship Management or CRM system. Other business owners might not even know what it is or how it can help them.

It may be risky to try to grow your business without one nowadays. Retaining and selling more to your current customers could be the difference between success or eventual failure.

Here are five simple ways that small business can benefit from CRM.

#1. Web Traffic Optimization

You probably get a fair amount of traffic to your website. If you have a blog or some free eBooks, you’re likely getting at least a trickle of visitors from the search engines. But, are you optimizing it? You need to capture that traffic. Many CRM services have forms you can embed to capture leads from your website.

#2. Enhancing Customer Service

It should be easy for anyone in your company to pull up any customer profile and look at all the interactions with that customer. You should, at the very least, be able to look at all the sales, customer support emails, and chats associated with that customer. In fact, anyone in your organization should be able to do so. Having an efficiency expert comb through each customer interaction could speed up your service or sales by a healthy percentage.

#3. Training New Recruits

A robust CRM system is a big asset when you are training new employees. If you can show new employees examples from your database during training, they will learn how to deal with your customers quickly and efficiently.

#4. Sales Rep Monitoring
How can you know who are closing sales and who are letting them go if you do not have some kind of sales rep monitoring. CRM will allow you to monitor the activity of your sales reps from anywhere and getting a close look at each sales rep’s statistics will help you know exactly what is going on.

#5. Customer Organization

It can be almost impossible to sift through hundreds, or even thousands, of customer profiles to find the data you are looking for in an old-fashioned paper system. Knowing who, where, and how all your customers are is one of the most important steps in moving your business forward.

Scaling your business, getting new people trained quickly, and monitoring personnel is a lot easier if you have a reliable CRM system in place.