If you are selling to small rather than large businesses you should note these key needs:
- Lead Generation – less company data available, coverage becomes important
- Lead Qualification – you need sift through a larger number of potential prospects, fast
- Sales Enablement & Engagement – to improve sales productivity, consistent sales process is key
- Customer Retention – more customers makes neglect more likely without a monitoring system
- Analysis & Analytics – forecast must rely on consistent scoring, not gut-feel
Depending on your specific offer and ideal customer profile, you may have each of these needs to a greater or lesser extent. In any case, your sales process will be quite different to that for enterprise sales.
The best CRM for selling to small businesses (SMB) must address these key needs.
Choosing a CRM
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is designed to enable the sales process, so choosing the best one for your business depends to a large extent on what your specific sales process is or might be.
In general however these key needs mean that most CRMs are a poor fit as they are designed for large business sales.
Best CRM for selling to SMB
The best CRM for selling to SMB must not only enable all the specific sales tasks required but must also be low-cost, simple and intuitive.
Perhaps you don’t have a dedicated sales person?
Then you also need the CRM to tell you what you need to do step by step, what’s best practice. You might need how-to videos and bullet points to help a novice build & qualify lead lists, write cold emails and make cold calls, etc.
Ideally, you want a single app to generate a list of prospects, enrich the data, enable and coach you in your custom sales process and record and measure your progress in a CRM.
There are many CRMs and Sales Enablement apps available but very few do all of this.
Only ProspectSafari is specifically designed for small business prospecting.
Why does this matter? Let’s look in more detail at those key needs.
Lead Generation
There is far less data available for small businesses and much of it is unreliable.
A list of small businesses in a given location needs to be freshly sourced from public / open sourced data that the business itself contributes to and keeps current.
The marvellous variety of small businesses, each seeking out their own niche and differentiator, makes classification by business type often quite tricky. Complex search algorithms leveraging company descriptions are often required in order to assemble the correct prospect list.
If the business has a website then that should be freshly scraped looking for specific data of interest, as this too can be assumed to be current.
Some CRMs offer lead generation within the same platform, but these generally are designed for enterprise business sales. They are both expensive and very poor at providing small business data, typically covering less than 10% of the market.
ProspectSafari has excellent coverage of small / local / niche businesses around the world and includes lead generation for a very low price.
Market Coverage
Whether you are selling to niche businesses worldwide or specific businesses types locally, it is very useful and important to work through a prospect list that represents ALL businesses that match the ideal customer profile within a given location.
You can break the list down into smaller lists each covering a specific business type and location, but each list should represent as close to 100% market coverage as possible.
From this starting point you can categorise and prioritise into groups for specific sales or marketing actions (or no action), but you will know that this is the total market.
This allows you to plan your campaigns and make evidence-based forecasts about similar campaigns in other locations.
It also means you have given yourself the best possible starting list.
How not to do it
The alternative is to start with a list of prospects that represents less than 10% of the target market. If you are relying on Apollo.io or Zoominfo or Lusha or any other database vendor to generate your list of small business prospects, then this will be the likely result.
Live tests on these platforms looking for CFAs in Utah, Vacation Rental Agencies in Catalonia, Cryogenic Research Labs in California, Stationary shops in Bologna and many other real life search requirements yielded less than 10% coverage.
| Category | Apollo coverage | Apollo.io Prospects | ProspectSafari Prospects |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cryogenics Research Laboratories in California | 5% | 1 prospect using "cryogenics" and "research" as required keywords | 19 prospects |
| CFA’s in Utah, USA | 8% | 8 prospects | 99 prospects |
| Rehab Centers in Denver, CO | 15% | 16 prospects after entering 5 alternative keywords | 106 prospects ("rehabilitation center") or 76 ("drug rehabilitation") |
| Stationery Shops in Bologna, Italy | 6% | 0 prospects ("stationary store") and 4 prospects ("Cartoleria") | 29 prospects ("stationary store") and 62 prospects ("Cartoleria") |
| Pet Care in Cyprus | 1-2% | 6 prospects using multiple keywords (Vet, Kennel, Dog Grooming, Cat Grooming, etc) | 503 prospects by entering "pet care in Cyprus" |
| Vacation Rental Agencies in Catalonia, Spain | 1% | 4 prospects using "vacation rental" in Hospitality Industry | 353 prospects using "vacation rental agency" |
Lead Qualification
Selling to small vs large companies means more potential prospects with less available information.
Large businesses are well known and can be filtered in/out very quickly, usually without much research.
Sales Productivity
Working through a list of unknown prospects to decide which are a good fit and worth engaging with takes time. Even if you spend only 1 minute researching each one before deciding, a list of 300 will take 5 hours. How much is an hour of your time worth?
Pursuing prospects that should have been eliminated is of course an even bigger time sink.
So how will you decide how to sort your list into priority groups?
If you are targeting large businesses you can get a list pre-filtered on turnover or number of employees, but no such data is reliably available for small businesses.
View website next to the data
You will probably want to look at their website (or facebook page or other listing if they don’t have a website) so having this preloaded to display live next to the CRM data would be ideal .
You are looking to see if this prospect meets your target profile. For instance, if you are a web developer you will want to use tools to assess website performance and underlying technologies.
If you are looking for something specific (certain keywords or the presence/absence of certain links) then an automated scrape of each website hunting for these would be useful.
Otherwise you need to click on the website or social url if you have it, open a new tab, wait for the website to load, do your research & appraisal, return to the CRM to enter each bit of data, perhaps jumping back to the website and back again to the CRM several times, then close the website tab.
And repeat that 300 times.
Best CRM for selling to small businesses
The best CRM for small business sales;
- displays the pre-loaded website next to the CRM data,
- opens other social urls or to search linkedin for related contacts with 1 click
- pre-scrapes each website, looking for contact details and the presence or your specific keywords or links
- enables rapid data entry with the website displaying side by side
- takes less than a third of time to review and categorise each prospect than other CRMs.
To maintain a healthy pipeline you need to add fresh prospects every week, so whatever tools you use, you need to establish an efficient prospect review – categorise – qualify routine
Sales Enablement and Engagement
Because of the high Prospect Volume (see above) you are repeating the same sales process over and over.
You also need to be adding fresh new prospects each week.
If your sales process includes an inefficient step that adds 10 minutes for each unqualified prospect and you are dealing with 50 new prospects each week, that’s 1 day wasted each week.
Best CRM for selling to small businesses
A good CRM should allow you to define your own custom sales process as a series of intelligent checklists, such that steps appear as and when required, with tasks automatically set and completed and alerts and notifications to ensure that nothing is overlooked.
These checklists and associated supporting material (documents and videos explaining best practice for each specific step, internal sales enablement documents to enable objection handling or competitive positioning, etc) are invaluable in bringing a new or part-time sales resource up to speed and ensuring consistent best practice.
Wasting extra time researching a big company is less problematic, but for small business prospecting the sales process must be efficient, honed and continuously improved.
Define the cookie-cutter and use it, every time.
Knowing when to stop
Perhaps the most important step in the sales process is knowing when to stop;
- Remove a poor prospect from the list after spending no more than a minute evaluating them.
- At each step, evaluate whether to continue with a high-touch process or to switch the prospect to say a drip-email campaign.
- Use consistent qualification questions to score the probability of success (see Forecasting).
Sending cold emails?
- Follow examples of best practice in crafting your approach emails and use personalised templates to avoid being ignored or marked as spam.
- Ensure outbound emails are queued and the pace of sending is throttled to avoid triggering ever-more stringent Google and Microsoft algorithms that will remove your email from your prospect’s inbox.
Use A/B testing to understand which variation of your email template and sequence is more likely to be opened or clicked.
A good CRM will offer tools like these to manage cold email campaigns, but many actually make cold email impossible.
If you plan on sending any cold emails, work with a software provider that understands this need and enables it.
Phone
Calling is a key part of small business prospecting.
If you are calling, you should use statistical methods to determine which prospects and which phone numbers are more likely to connect and focus your call time on these. This will more than double your dial to connect rate and thus double the number of meaningful conversations for the time you have available for calling.
Again, how much is an hour of your time worth?
The best CRM for selling to small businesses enables this “Intelligent Call List” and shows local time for your contact and the likelihood of connecting. Others do not.
Customer Retention
The more customers you have, the more likely you are to neglect them.
You need a system that tracks and records every interaction automatically and puts as much as possible on auto-pilot;
- An inbound email from a customer should trigger a notification and set a task to ensure that there is a timely response.The task can be in your calendar until it is automatically removed when a reply is sent, for example.
- A routine follow-up call can be scheduled for each customer every x weeks.
- Newsletters or a sequence of on-boarding and cross-selling emails can be scheduled automatically.
With intelligent checklists and workflows, you set the process and it then keeps working 24/7.
No more neglected customers.
Analytics & Insights
Accurate forecasting of sales is important to any organisation, to enable resource planning, inventory management, financial planning and operational management.
Pipeline Forecasting
There are various methods to forecast sales but pipeline forecasting is the most accurate and is generally used for larger B2B deals. Each deal is analysed and the probability of a win is estimated.
This is a key opportunity for coaching. Feedback on the probability of winning a specific deal and what must be done to improve these odds is of enormous benefit to the sales person, whether they are a seasoned pro or a newbie.
The sum of all the individual deal forecasts then gives the sales manager a basis for predicting the revenue at the end of the current month, quarter or year.
How not to do it
Despite this importance, most sales organisations, even in Fortune 100 multinationals, still use “gut-feeling” pipeline forecasting.
The likelihood of winning each deal is guesstimated by the sales rep and his manager then modifies that estimate or the total, again using gut-feel. Perhaps the modification compensates for presumed optimism/pessimism in the sales rep. Perhaps it is done to incentivize, or for any number of personal reasons. The coaching opportunity is wasted.
This is unscientific at best and considered a complete waste of time by the sales rep who usually gains nothing from the exercise.
Small Deal Forecasting
If you have a large number of low value deals for small companies then discussion of each one is not tenable. Pipeline forecasting is therefore not often used.
To use accurate pipeline forecasting at scale you need to have an objective, consistent method for calculating the individual deal win probability, with minimal effort.
The method must be continuously improved by comparing prior forecasts with actual results for each deal and adjusting the algorithm, such that the accuracy of the forecast keeps improving.
Most CRMs however (eg Hubspot, Zoho, Pipedrive, Salesforce, etc) use deal progress as a proxy for win probability (i.e. 40% of steps completed, so 40% win probability). This score offers no insight to the sales rep and poor accuracy.
Qualification Questions: the Gold Standard in Deal Forecasting
The gold standard in deal forecasting is to use a consistent set of qualification questions each scored on a scale of 1-5, ideally using Evidence Based Qualification (EBQ) to inject objectivity.
Qualification methods used by world-leading sales organisations include BANT, MEDDICC, SCOTSMAN, FACT, but any sales organisation can and should define their own simple set of qualification questions based on their own experience.
A common mistake is to assume that all such questions are of equal importance. The right approach is to use machine learning to calculate the weighting to give to each answer.
This can be done iteratively after each and every win or loss, recalculating the weighting to give the most accurate predictive value to the overall deal score. The more win and loss data there is, the better the forecast accuracy.
Pavlovian Sales Training
If your boss requires you to answer qualification questions but you see no benefit then this becomes yet another time-wasting, box-ticking exercise to be avoided.
If however the answers to these questions instantly yield a win probability that is known to be accurate, then the dynamic changes. You pay attention to the questions and focus on getting the answers, as that will lead to your personal success. Effectively you self-coach and automatically work to best practice.
Keep it simple
The best CRM for selling to small businesses should therefore provide a simple interface to answer custom qualification questions to calculate a highly accurate deal win probability score.
By simply and quickly clicking a few buttons to adjust your answers to 5-8 questions after each contact with a prospect, this iterative system automatically generates a weighted qualification system unique to your specific business and produces a sales forecast that is 10-15 times more reliable. It also provides valuable and valued guidance to the sales rep, revealing gaps in their knowledge or specific issues to address to progress the deal.
Only ProspectSafari offers this.
ProspectSafari: the Best CRM for Selling to Small Businesses
ProspectSafari is designed to address all the sales needs of a small B2B business.
Without the need for additional apps or expensive add-ons it combines exceptional small / local / niche business lead generation with a full CRM including sales enablement tools, email templates and sequences, intelligent checklists and much more.
It is far better than Apollo.io in generating lists of small businesses.
See Alternatives to Apollo.io: A Better CRM for Small Business Sales for more details.
With its unique side-by-side website view and prospect evaluation tools, website scraping and rapid data entry, Intelligent Checklists with fully customisable sales enablement features, Intelligent Call List and world-leading Smart Forecasting it is far more advanced than CRMs costing way more.
At only $25 per month, it is by far the best CRM for small business sales.