A Free CRM Lets Small Businesses Take On The Giants

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of SharpSpring CRM for IZEA Worldwide. All opinions are 100% mine.

There’s one lesson that every entrepreneur learns very fast.

The market isn’t equal.

If you’re a new company coming into the market with a smart, new idea, you’re going to struggle. It doesn’t matter how great your idea is or how great a business mind you possess, you’re going to finding yourself running up against giants that have already staked out their claims.

Their product might not be as good as yours. Their business processes might not be as efficient as yours. But they’re bigger than you. They’ve got more money than you. And they’ve got the tools to keep you in your place. A big company, for example, will be able to run the kind of expensive marketing automation software that small businesses can only dream of. They can identify leads, track them, score them, shoot out messages to them, convert them and keep them smoothly, easily and reliably.

Small businesses, by contrast, have always had to work blind. They’ve had to wait for an enquiry to come out of the blue then hope that their general sales message resonates with each lead. It’s hard going.

But that’s now changing. SharpSpring has been around since 2014 and its affordable marketing automation (similar platform to HubSpot, Marketo and Pardot) has been used by more than 1,500 marketing agencies and over 7,000 businesses.

It’s now offering its CRM for free.

This is a big deal.  SharpSpring CRM is a  free sales CRM packed with all sorts of features that make marketing so much easier. You get a customizable pipeline, advanced reporting, social media listening, and even lead scoring that shows how hot a lead is based on their interactions with your business.

So if someone comes to your site, you’ll be able to see which pages they visited. A member of your team  could receive a notification when that user returns to your website If they enter their email address on a form, you’ll capture all the engagement plus the emails you send each other on a timeline in the contact record of the CRM. You can tell what they’ve read, ignored, clicked in and all the site visits they’ve made. .. The lead scoring, which rises as the contact engages more and more with your brand , will show how close they are to a conversion. The more you get to know them, the more detailed their profile becomes. You’ll even be able to check out their social media pages to understand their issues and their concerns. If they’ve talked about your product online, you’ll be able to see that too.

It’s powerful stuff: a mixture of marketing tools, sales pipeline management,, personalization, and prospect intelligence that enables a sales team to deliver exactly the right messages to exactly the right leads. It’s the sort of tool that until now has only been available to firms with pockets deep enough to pay for it.

But SharpSpring isn’t offering a free trial. It’s a completely free CRM for small businesses. You’ll be able to use all of those features for nothing for an unlimited amount of time, however small your business. You can even add as many users as you want, so your entire team will have access to the customer data it collects.

Usually companies have to wait until they’re established enough to be able to pay giant subscription fees before they can access marketing tools this powerful. But SharpSpring has levelled the playing field. Now anyone can have access to all the information they need to identify and convert leads quickly and easily—and you’ll be able to take on the big players with nothing more than a good idea and smart management. Give it a try.

Disclaimer: I get paid for recommending products, including this one, but I wouldn’t recommend it if I didn’t believe in it. SharpSpring are offering a valuable tool for small businesses for free. You should check it out.