CRM Software Solutions and other Great Tools for the One-Man Business
Anybody who outpourings a small business that is a one-man operation knows the feeling well. Customers call you to see if they can do business with you, discover that you’re the proprietor, the secretary, the accountant, the receptionist and the stockist altogether combined, and start to wonder if you could possibly have the sort of expertise that they’re seeking. It’s simply the way people think – a large business is equated with success and ability. Success breeds success. So what is a small one-man business to do to inspire that kind of confidence in customers who come calling? How do you make your business as if it has a bottomless bank account, office all over the place and hordes of employees? There are certain tools that are now available that give one-man businesses and other small enterprises the ability to appear to have the capabilities and the powers of a large business. They are called CRM software solutions.
Consider a small specialty video service. They take your home videos, polish them up, do a little of stylish editing, set everything to a bit of great music, and give you a professional MTV video-like home video to put on YouTube. There are a lot of these around the country, and most of them were founded, bankrolled and are run by one person. Any time one of these businesses manages to be noticed at a local fair or something where dozens of people drop by. They can usually get hundreds of leads from people who leave their names other contact info. How is one person to keep track of all this? One uses CRM software solutions designed for small business, such as the one provided by BatchBook. All you need to do is get your CRM to play with some web-based e-mail marketing service like Constant Contact, enter all the leads that you can get into the system and watch as it deals with sending out automatic follow-up e-mail, and keeping track of all the responds to it gets. Generally, you get a response rate this way that is far superior to what you would with a general e-mail marketing campaign. With a very simple system such as this in place that can handle hundreds of the e- mails whole day with little input from the busy business owner, it can be easy for anybody to pretend like they have the resources of a much larger enterprise.
CRM software solutions aren’t the only thing that a small businessman can make use of.
How about the ShoeBoxed service? The typical small businessman receives receipts, business cards and other slips of paper through the day. It can take quite a bit of time to organize these, categorize them and save them. Sign up for the ShoeBoxed service, and they give you a bunch of prepaid envelopes. Any time that you have a certain amount of paper stuff that’s collected in your drawer, all you need to do is to stuff everything into among those envelopes and send it over to the company. They’ll extract all the content in them, all the expenses in the receipts and set up a suitable management system for you.
There are others CRM software solutions also. A service like FreshBooks helps a tiny businessman (it’s the business that is tiny and not the man) make the best use of the time they spend commuting or otherwise traveling. With their iPhone app installed, anybody can use their time commuting to prescribe an invoice into their iPhone or to dictate anything else. They get professional-looking invoices sent to them immediately. These might be little touches; but they go a long way in helping businesses look professional and capable.
