Act! Released Findings On the Role of CRM in Today’s SMBs

In May, we partnered with Act! to survey 1,146 U.S. small and medium-sized business owners and managers. The study was conducted to better understand how their usage of customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation solutions have impacted their financial success. In addition, we studied cloud adoption and drivers for moving to the cloud. Surprisingly, a large number of small businesses reported that they don’t use CRM’s, with 45% of the SMBs’ operations still relying on paper records and another 11% having no management system in place at all. The reasons given for this lack of management came down to respondents’ feeling that their business is either too small (47%) or that CRM software isn’t applicable to them (28%). To illustrate why making a change can have a positive impact on a business, the survey results show that “Respondents noted improvements from utilizing CRM technology across the board for their business, with the top five improvements being sales productivity (42%), customer service (35%), business productivity (33%), marketing outreach (32%) and customer satisfaction (30%). There was also a significant improvement in customer retention (28%) among respondents—which was noted as a top challenge for SMBs.”

Read more at Martech Cube, Business Wire, and Marketing Charts.

Author Notes:

Jeffrey Henning

Jeffrey Henning, IPC is a professionally certified researcher and has personally conducted over 1,400 survey research projects. Jeffrey is a member of the Insights Association and the American Association of Public Opinion Researchers. In 2012, he was the inaugural winner of the MRA’s Impact award, which “recognizes an industry professional, team or organization that has demonstrated tremendous vision, leadership, and innovation, within the past year, that has led to advances in the marketing research profession.” In 2022, the Insights Association named him an IPC Laureate. Before founding Researchscape in 2012, Jeffrey co-founded Perseus Development Corporation in 1993, which introduced the first web-survey software, and Vovici in 2006, which pioneered the enterprise-feedback management category. A 35-year veteran of the research industry, he began his career as an industry analyst for an Inc. 500 research firm.