Small businesses almost always find it challenging to get started and productive with new business solutions—and CRM is no exception. 
Just figuring out which solution will work best is often the biggest hurdle—followed by the “lack of” problems—lack of time, money and expertise. As a result, many small businesses continue to rely on a tangle of spreadsheets, contact managers and email to manage pipelines and sales.
Zoho Bigin Steps In
Last week Zoho stepped in with its new CRM solution, Bigin, designed and priced specifically for small businesses. According to Raju Vegesna, chief evangelist at Zoho, the company created Bigin specifically to “help small businesses achieve maximum growth with a minimal learning curve.”
Bigin is a pipeline-centric CRM that small businesses can set up in 30-minutes, using Zoho’s guided set-up and onboarding tools.
The solution focuses on providing critical lead-management automation that small businesses need, including:
- Multiple pipelines for customer operations, which can be customized by deal stage and other elements.
- Built-in telephony to place and receive calls anytime, anywhere. Users that want to take advantage of this feature can choose from several Zoho telephony providers in the Zoho Phonebridge marketplace.
- Workflow automation, which allows users to create automated workflows with visual, drag and drop tools to reduce the time it takes to perform manual tasks.
Real-time notifications and analytics enable notifications with Bigin, and provide users with ready-made dashboards, charts and KPIs to give them the information they need to make better decisions.
Bigin is available now. Zoho offers a free version of Bigin for individual users. Beyond that, pricing is $7 per user per month.
Perspective
Bigin offers users a lot of core functionality for very little money. But as importantly, Zoho is consciously avoiding bloating the solution with the long-tail of endless features that add complexity—and that most small businesses won’t need or use.
Small businesses are the engine of our economy. In the U.S. alone, they account for 99.7% of U.S. employer firms, 64% of net new private-sector jobs, and 49% of private-sector employment.
But smaller companies are most likely to be getting hit the hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic and associated fallout. As they reboot their businesses for the next normal—whatever that looks like—small businesses will need tools to re-engage with existing customers and attract new ones in a more streamlined, personalized way.
Bigin isn’t the only CRM option for small businesses that want to move beyond spreadsheets and kluge-y workarounds. But Zoho deserves kudos for thoroughly addressing the “lack of” barriers that hamper CRM adoption—and for providing small businesses with an accessible, affordable tool to transform customer engagement to help enable growth.
© SMB Group 2020
Source: Laurie McCabe’s Blog