Integrated Business Solutions: Helping SMBs Keep Pace with Customers Perspectives Study

Introduction | 2

Section 1: SMB Goals Remain Constant, but Customer Expectations Are Rising | 2

Section 2: Can Your Business Keep Pace? | 3

Section 3: Customer Records Don’t Stop at CRM | 5

Section 4: Getting Ahead of the Curve | 6

Summary and Perspective | 8 8

Laurie McCabe

Sanjeev Aggarwal

February 2017

Sponsored by:

Integrated Business Solutions: Helping SMBs Keep Pace with Customers| 2

Introduction

In today’s increasingly digital economy, the right technology solutions can help small and medium businesses (SMBs) attract new customers, keep existing customers happy and grow revenues. But many SMBs suffer from the Goldilocks dilemma when it comes to customer relationship management (CRM). On the one hand, cobbling together low-end marketing, sales and service applications is inefficient and unlikely to give the business the horsepower necessary to grow. On the other hand, SMBs often find that “enterprise” CRM suites are too expensive and complex. Also, both of these options usually require additional—and often expensive—integration to unify customer data and workflows with financial systems.

However, there is a middle ground that can be just right: using a customer management solution that was designed to work with financials “out of the box”—or increasingly, in the cloud. With both customer and financial data stored in one system, information can flow easily from marketing and sales to order processing and payments—and then to customer service. This helps streamline operations and makes it easier for everyone to see what’s going on in the business and make better decisions.

Section 1: SMB Goals Remain Constant, but Customer Expectations Are Rising

Growing revenue, attracting new customers and improving customer experience and retention are

among the top business priorities for SMBs (Figure 1). But as technology shifts more power to

buyers, SMB decision makers need to ask themselves if they’re prepared to provide the

experience that both B2C and B2B customers increasingly expect.

Figure 1: Top SMB Business Challenges

Source: SMB Group 2017 SMB Routes to Market Study

Integrated Business Solutions: Helping SMBs Keep Pace with Customers| 3

Buyers have more knowledge, choice and power than ever before. The internet and mobile

devices make it easy for buyers to tap into an ever-widening range of digital content, ratings and

reviews to educate themselves, get advice and improve the odds that they’re making the right

choice. And when buyers use social media to share information about their experiences, their

feedback can get massively amplified—for better or worse.

To meet the expectations of today’s buyers, businesses need to do the following:

• Demonstrate a strong understanding of buyer needs.

• Offer a smooth, easy purchase process—regardless of the purchase channel—once

customers are ready to buy.

• Provide a good service experience, from presales to returns to service calls.

Section 2: Can Your Business Keep Pace?

CRM solutions are designed to help businesses keep up with and satisfy more demanding customer expectations across the marketing, sales and service continuum. But many SMBs continue to rely on a tangle of spreadsheets and contact managers to handle sales, marketing and service functions (Figures 2 and 3). Figure 2: SMB Marketing, Sales and Service Solution Use and Plans

Source: SMB Group 2017 SMB Routes to Market Study

Integrated Business Solutions: Helping SMBs Keep Pace with Customers| 4

“I used to get frantic calls from the outside sales team asking for access to vital

information to help close deals. The sales reps were never allowed into our ERP

system, but now that we use Acumatica, they can connect at any time. They can

access data within the permission levels they have been granted. They can see which

customers ordered in the past and get reports. With access to CRM, they can see notes

and activities entered by the customer service team. There is improved communication

between our reps and the inside team, which we didn’t have before.”

— Jodi Anstandig, Finance Director, Biopelle

Figure 3: Top Three Marketing, Sales and Service Brands Used by SMBs

Source: SMB Group, 2017 At some point, using disjointed CRM solutions that don’t “talk to each other” starts to stifle the business instead of helping it grow. For instance, conversion rates may slip as new leads fall through the cracks or repeat and referral business drops off. At this point, SMBs need to take the plunge into an integrated CRM suite. But although they may be ready to invest the time and money necessary, many SMBs find these solutions too costly and difficult to use.

Integrated Business Solutions: Helping SMBs Keep Pace with Customers| 5

“Having the order system and the CRM separate from each other before, we couldn’t

see too easily what our sales efforts were yielding, whereas now, with Acumatica, we

can. If we can see what’s working and what isn’t, we can grow easier.”

— Justin LeFlaive, Finance Manager, Toffeln (UK)

Section 3: Customer Records Don’t Stop at CRM

Even when companies successfully implement an integrated CRM suite, financial customer

records still remain siloed in a separate financials system. The business still has applications that

don’t “talk to each other,” and it’s still difficult to get a complete view of the customer.

For all but the smallest of companies, this creates a drag on day-to-day operations and hinders

growth. Sales may be focusing too much time on low-value customers and not enough time on the

most profitable ones. Because management doesn’t have a complete, end-to-end view of the

business, opportunities may slip through the cracks. And if billing and financial data isn’t linked to

marketing and sales information, it is very difficult to correlate campaign response rates and sales

performance to overall profitability.

Having to waste time looking up and moving information back and forth between CRM and email

to reconcile customer information exacerbates the drag on productivity as well as sales and

service effectiveness. For example, consider the situation when a prospect submits an email

inquiry, and the company’s CRM and email aren’t integrated. In this case, a sales rep must first

look up the contact in CRM to see his/her prior history and interactions in order to send a

personalized response to the inquiry, and then the sales rep must copy and paste the inquiry

information from email to CRM.

Although the market encompasses many integration tools, they are often expensive, time

consuming and/or complex to use. Consequently, most SMBs turn to labor-intensive workarounds

and manual data uploads to try to reconcile customer information across CRM, financial/ERP and

email solutions. This approach is tedious and time consuming, and it doesn’t provide the workflow

integration required to streamline processes. Other SMBs turn to brittle custom coding, which is

difficult and costly to alter when business needs dictate process changes and improvements. In a

nutshell, these options may provide a quick fix, but they won’t deliver the flexibility and scalability

that growing businesses need to keep up with market demands over the long term.

Integrated Business Solutions: Helping SMBs Keep Pace with Customers| 6

Figure 4: SMB Business Application Integration

Source: SMB Group 2017 SMB Routes to Market Study

Section 4: Getting Ahead of the Curve

SMBs do have another choice: financials/ERP and CRM solutions, such as those offered by

Acumatica, that are built to work with each other from the ground up. When financials/ERP and

CRM are tightly integrated by design and run on the same database, SMBs gain the following

benefits:

• Cost and time savings, as they don’t need to invest time or money to build clunky custom

code or to choose and deploy expensive third-party integration tools

• Clear visibility and better decision making through integrated dashboards that provide roles-

based access to manage forecasts, quotes and results

• Improved collaboration, because everyone in the organization is “on the same page” with

consistent, updated information, as well as the ability to more easily create customer portals

to communicate with customers from marketing to ordering through to delivery and post-

sales support

In fact, SMBs that have fully integrated business solutions are 29% more likely to expect revenue

growth than those that have only partially integrated these solutions, and they are 40% more likely

than those that have not done any integration.

Integrated Business Solutions: Helping SMBs Keep Pace with Customers| 7

“We have a much better understanding of our customers and their patterns. We can

better follow up to ensure we don’t miss a service and thus increase our revenue

significantly. Since all the customer data is now in one place, our teams are much

better equipped to do after-sales check-ins. The management also utilizes Acumatica

to look at pipeline and utilization for future growth and resource requirements.”

— Wong Tshun Peei, Managing Director, One Hygienic

“One of the great new features we like in Acumatica 6 is the Outlook plug-in. We use it

every day. To be able to be in Outlook and with the simple click of a button, integrate

contacts within Acumatica has really helped us build up our customer database.” — Dan Wilkins, Partner, Bell and Company

SMBs can also reap big productivity benefits and improve sales and service responsiveness when

CRM integrates with email. For instance, Acumatica provides an Microsoft Office 365 Outlook add-

in so employees can look up CRM information on email senders who use Outlook. The add-in

works with any data that’s in the Acumatica CRM system. Sales or service reps can view the

Outlook user’s history, enabling them to provide faster, personalized follow up. If the person

sending the email isn’t in the CRM system, reps can create a contact and mark it as a lead or an

opportunity from their email inboxes, whether they’re using a laptop or mobile phone or tablet. In

addition, they no longer have to copy and paste information from email into the CRM system.

Integrated Business Solutions: Helping SMBs Keep Pace with Customers| 8

Summary and Perspective

The cloud makes it relatively easy for SMBs to add new applications, but integration is too often

an afterthought. However, integration is essential to helping SMBs reap the full business process

value of new applications—and to gain a unified, consistent view of the company.

Having integrated customer data—across CRM and financials systems—helps SMBs do more

with less. Integration enables SMBs to streamline workflows and information sharing across

different functional areas of the business. This provides a more complete view of the customer as

well as the agility and insights needed to improve customer interactions, engagement and

experience—and to grow the business.

Although one size CRM does not fit all, many SMBs can potentially reap big benefits from

financials/ERP and CRM solutions that are designed and built to work together from the outset.

SMBs that are considering new CRM and/or financials/ERP solutions should evaluate integration

capabilities and benefits as thoroughly as feature sets when investigating solutions.

SMB GROUP, INC.

SMB Group focuses exclusively on researching and analyzing the highly fragmented “SMB

market”—which is composed of many smaller, more discrete markets. Within the SMB

market, SMB Group’s areas of focus include Emerging Technologies, Cloud Computing,

Managed Services, Business and Marketing Applications, Collaboration and Social Media

Solutions, IT Infrastructure Management and Services, and Green IT. Read our 2017 Top

10 SMB Technology Trends for our views on game-changers in these and other areas of

the SMB market.

© SMB Group, 2017