Business News Daily provides resources, advice and product reviews to drive business growth. Our mission is to equip business owners with the knowledge and confidence to make informed decisions. As part of that, we recommend products and services for their success.
We collaborate with business-to-business vendors, connecting them with potential buyers. In some cases, we earn commissions when sales are made through our referrals. These financial relationships support our content but do not dictate our recommendations. Our editorial team independently evaluates products based on thousands of hours of research. We are committed to providing trustworthy advice for businesses. Learn more about our full process and see who our partners are here.
An integrated point-of-sale and CRM system can streamline sales and marketing operations, saving your business time and money.
New small business owners should know that point-of-sale (POS) systems are changing. Bottom line: There’s no going back to traditional POS terminals.
That’s good news if you’re just starting out, because technological advancements in these systems make running a business easier than ever. One of the most innovative POS advancements is integration with customer relationship management (CRM) tools, helping businesses track leads, record customer purchase habits, increase sales and save money.
We’ll explore the basics of POS and CRM systems and explain how CRM-enabled POS systems can help your business hit the ground running from day one.
Every business needs a way to accept payments. A POS system allows customers to pay for a company’s products or services. When customers make purchases using credit cards, debit cards or digital wallets, they use the POS system to complete transactions.
The POS system setup is a combination of hardware and software.
As your business grows, a good POS system can adapt to your changing needs. While traditional POS systems complete orders and payments from a stand-alone terminal, today’s POS systems can perform advanced tasks, such as processing credit cards using mobile POS systems and transmitting sales data to the business’s other software tools. In addition, many POS systems now come with built-in CRM features.
Obtaining and keeping customers is the first task for any new business or startup. A CRM system helps a company store and manage customer data. It enables customer service, sales, business development, marketing, recruitment and other departments to manage external interactions and customer relationships.
A CRM system provides a central location for storing potential and current customers’ contact information. CRM analytics can help businesses make better decisions, identify sales opportunities, track customer interactions, manage marketing campaigns and record service issues.
With a CRM system, you won’t have to perform CRM tasks manually, including inputting customer information, creating sales reports and updating customer databases in the cloud.
By integrating POS systems with popular CRM solutions — such as Salesforce, SugarCRM and Magento — new businesses can save time and money while using POS data to build solid relationships with customers and deliver the best customer experience possible.
A POS system with CRM features serves as a hub for merging the company’s sales, inventory and customer management services. It automates the process of sharing information collected through POS systems, so its CRM capabilities can use the data collected.
CRM-enabled POS systems have a wide range of capabilities, including the following:
By leveraging a CRM-enabled POS system, startups can build stronger relationships with customers, improve customer satisfaction and drive long-term business growth.
Here are five specific ways CRM-enabled POS systems can help your business grow robustly from opening day.
Need to collect customer information? A POS system with built-in CRM functionality makes this task easier by automating information gathering to capture customer data quickly.
Instead of inputting customer information into a CRM solution by hand, you can use a CRM-enabled POS system to collect the data from a transaction and then automatically export and save it.
These POS systems can transmit all types of information your CRM solution requires, such as customer names, billing and shipping addresses, email addresses, and preferred nicknames. This automation can save you time and money by eliminating the labor required to input data manually.
One of the most effective ways to grow sales is paying attention to what customers want and need. With a CRM-friendly POS system, businesses can easily collect and keep track of customer preferences and buying histories and transmit that information to CRM systems in real time.
This information helps businesses better target marketing campaigns, upsell at the point of sale, and cater offerings to individuals or groups of customers to improve the customer experience.
Once you obtain a solid customer base, you want to keep them coming back. One of the primary benefits of CRM software is that it can identify your most loyal customers.
Integrating that capability with advanced POS systems can help you discover your three primary customer groups: those who have the most significant impact at the point of sale, those who are likely to return, and those not worth the time and effort to pursue.
Sharing information among staff members can be difficult or confusing. A CRM-enabled POS system can improve workplace collaboration among departments, thus organizing and synchronizing transactions, customer details and other sales data in real time.
This information is continually updated and available anytime to staff members, who log in to a single platform to access it. This functionality means no more wasted time sifting through inboxes, folders and random corners of your server and no more confusion over the most current version of a file or database.
CRM-integrated POS systems don’t just automate tasks at the point of sale. They can also automate back-end tasks, such as reporting, exporting data, creating client records and even populating email marketing lists — all straight from the POS system.
Because of these capabilities, there’s no need to go into multiple programs to perform these functions manually. That takes monotonous CRM-related administrative tasks off your staff’s shoulders.
Some POS systems have built-in CRM features, and some CRM software integrates easily with POS systems.
These are some excellent examples of POS systems with CRM features:
Dual CRM and POS is a two-way street, as some CRM platforms offer POS extensions. Here are two of our favorites:
Even if your CRM software doesn’t offer its own POS technology, it may integrate with whatever POS system best fits your business.
For example, Freshworks and Zendesk both integrate with the POS system Vend. Read our review of Freshworks CRM and our Zendesk review for more information.
Whenever you’re considering new POS or CRM technology, it’s worthwhile to contact a sales rep and ask about integrations. You might find the solution you need.
For many businesses, both POS systems and CRM systems are critically important for the sales and customer service functions. By combining them in one system, you reduce the learning curve for your staff by limiting the tools they need to become familiar with. You can also share data between the two systems instantly so that sales registered on your POS system are logged in your CRM system, for example. These time-saving measures can be invaluable as you grow your business, helping you get more done with fewer resources.
Max Freedman and Jacob Bierer-Nielsen contributed to this article.