How to Retain and grow your Client Base

Clients are the lifeblood of every business. Thanks to your clients you have orders, cash flow and the opportunity to grow your business through referrals. Every business needs clients.

That is why it is so important to take care of your clients and make sure that they know you don’t only appreciate them because they pay for your services, but also because you appreciate their confidence in you.

Usually, when starting a business your client base is relatively small. So maintaining personal relationships with your clients easy. This is evident in various manners, such as responding to emails or phone calls moments after receiving a message, being able to remember each client’s name and that of their close family or just having the opportunity to call any given client just to check up on them and see how they are doing.

Nonetheless, as you grow you also experience growing pains and maintaining current clients while still looking for new clients can quickly become a hassle. So the question is, how can small businesses grow and at the same time keep all clients happy?

Client Relationship Management

One effective way to keep clients happy is through using Client Relationship Management software, or CRM. What is this software? CRM software assists businesses in managing relationships with their customer base and the information associated with them.

When used effectively, it can be an important factor in scaling your business into something much more.

Accounting & CRM – The best of both worlds!

Even though CRM consolidates information from various departments such as marketing, business development and even customer service, the contribution that your accounting can make is equally as important. Why? Simply because one of your main relationships with your clients is through what you sell them and for every sale that is made your accounting department maintains a detail of what is sold to who and when.

Also, since receivables are managed directly by your accounting department, when using CRM software your collections department can easily be updated as to which aged receivables need to be collected.

When used properly CRM software that is integrated with your accounting platform can definitely be advantageous. Unfortunately, the costs associated with and even the technical requirements may make integration impossible or impractical for some desktop applications.  Although, this isn’t necessarily the case with cloud accounting applications, in fact, many of them already have integrated specific CRM applications or have certain aspects of these programs.

Cloud accounting is definitely your best option if you are a small business owner to scale your business and at the same time retain current clients.

In this article we discussed how online accounting software can integrate with CRM applications. If you are interested in knowing more about cloud accounting and how your business can move to such a platform, feel free to contact us HERE to find out more. Not only can we assist you in transitioning to a new platform, but we can also guide you in choosing the best one for you.