Running a small business is no easy feat. Regardless of how determined you are to succeed, without the right strategies and support in place, your dreams of running a successful business can quickly fall apart.

Any small business which has no business plan or formal processes in place to track their activities risk complete failure and even bankruptcy. Regardless of the size of your business, there are several things that are considered crucial to the success of your business. These include marketing and advertising and of course, having goods or products that are in demand.



When a new business starts up without a business plan, there are no goals in place and nothing to aim for. Without goals, you can’t track your successes or achievements, and there is no basis for comparison. This simply encourages these types of businesses to try everything and anything in order to secure orders and market frantically in order to make some money.

The backbone of any business is a good marketing strategy and without this, even a successful business will fail. Businesses using a ‘stab in the dark’ approach where their marketing efforts are wasted because they market to untargeted prospects, are one of the worst mistakes that can be made by any small business.

In any small business, financial resources are scarce and budgets are often very limited. Business owners usually claw back on advertising and marketing when things are financially tight because of the typically high cost of these types of activities. This is a mistake to make and can cripple your business completely. In fact, in times of recession, your marketing efforts should be greater to help you reach out to new customers and keep existing ones.

Most small businesses fail in their marketing efforts since they aren’t targeted to the prospects individual circumstances and needs. Instead, what you find is that small businesses send out generic mailings to those who aren’t interested in their goods. This gives a poor response rate and an even worse return on investment.

However, investing in a CRM (customer relationship management) system to help capture, store and profile customer data can be seen as the magic bullet for those businesses desperately seeking results and high returns.

The benefits of a CRM system are huge. It can reduce marketing and advertising costs to the bare minimum and help create highly targeted marketing campaigns which not only help small businesses hit the ground running, but can offer a huge response rate and increase spending behaviour by prospects

By using the tracking features on a CRM system, you can collect information about a prospect’s buying behaviour and tailor promotions to them. It can help any small business owner plan for future goals and manage their business in a more relaxed and focused manner, helping their business to not only survive, but to positively thrive as well.

This article was written by Workbooks, leading supplier of web-based CRM systems.