If you’re in business, one of your primary objectives is, of course, to grow. The expansion is a wonderful thing, but it also carries several inherent problems. As you grow, you need more staff. You require more space if only to park those new employees. If you’re in the manufacturing sector, you may need additional facilities.
And more to the point of this article, you’ll need your computing resources to keep up: processing speed for larger amounts of data, increased storage space, and applications that can keep up with the demand. It is in this realm that a cloud CRM solution can be of major benefit.
Carefully Monitoring Growth
In using a traditional on-site CRM system, growth has always meant keeping a firm eye on such resources. Your sales force relies on CRM (or at least they should) for monitoring and controlling their sales cycles. Sales management, financial executives, tech support and customer service all count on CRM to keep them informed and to coordinate customer relations activities. If traffic demands cause a CRM application to start hanging, performing slowly, or encountering errors, it could bring a fast-moving business to its knees. A sales rep in the field, with a prospect sitting right in front of them, could be forced to keep the prospect engaged while waiting for access or data crucial to the sale.
For a large corporation, this is rarely an issue; it has the budget to stay ahead of the curve as regards computing resources and IT staff and get the right tool to manage their sales process. But a smaller business cannot always afford to continuously add server power, storage capacity and other equipment such as routers to smoothly keep up. Nor can it afford the additional IT staff—or at least staff hours—to install and maintain all that new equipment.
A corporate enterprise with tens of thousands of staff isn’t likely to double its size in a short amount of time—whereas it’s certainly possible for a smaller business of 20 staff to grow to 40 in a few months. That’s double the resources being consumed. Fortunately we now have cloud CRM—a real boon for such organizations.
Flexibility in the Cloud CRM
While traditional on-site CRM solutions would require an increase in hardware resources in order to scale to the next level, a cloud CRM solution only requires an increase in the number of user licenses. A cloud provider is completely equipped to deal with increased traffic; the rapid processing of mammoth amounts of data is its business.
Conversely, if for some reason you must reduce your staff—for example, if you found you had over hired in anticipation of a seasonal overload and need to cut back—you can reduce the number of licenses you are currently using. The right CRM will help to make your sales process scalable. If you were still operating an on-site CRM solution, you may have made a costly purchase of hardware in the same anticipation, which is money you’re not going to get back. This is also true if you had purchased licenses (as opposed to adding or deleting them from a cloud-based subscription model); you’re stuck with those extra licenses.
When a business is in its early growth phase this kind of flexibility is crucially important. The ability to only utilize the resources you actually need was just a dream a decade ago—but today the advent of a cloud CRM brings this dream to a very cost-effective and convenient reality.
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