User Review
( votes)Solopreneurs sound small and insignificant yet they are a huge part of the world economy. In the USA alone, small businesses comprise 99.9% of all businesses with 47.5% employee share and 30.2 million small businesses.
Out of those 30 million businesses, non-employer firms take up a gigantic 24.3 million, which is 80.5% of small businesses!
Solopreneur statistics USA: nonemployer firms
This branch is well-represented in such economic segments as technical services, construction, administrative, real estate, transportation, entertainment, healthcare.
This is why we decided to go into detail about how to use CRM for solo entrepreneurs.
If you are working as a tutor, event planner, caterer, financial consultant, virtual assistant, accountant, or insurance consultant, chances are, you have a database of contacts, vendors to email, and clients to meet.
This means you need a CRM for single users.
The great news is, unlike pricey ERP solutions for big corporations, this one is a cloud-based technology available from anywhere with the internet and costs a few lattes a month.
Literally. If billed annually, Nimble is just $19 per user per month.
Let’s go through how Nimble CRM can be used to grow a budding business, or how an established nonemployer firm can retain customers and generate leads with this social Customer Relationship Management system.
What’s a Personal CRM?
A personal CRM is usually a Customer Relationship Management System that is used by a single person: be it for business or to organize family matters.
There is a blurred line between business and hobby nowadays though.
If you make your living as an Instagram blogger, you are still doing what you love but making money for it.
If you cook cakes and sell them to the coffee shops in your neighborhood, you are still doing what you love and making money out of it.
If you are a mom of 3 and a wife of a working husband – your schedule is probably busier than that of a president but you are still not making any money out of it.
If you are working half a day rescuing animals off the streets and not making money out of it – you still have so much to do with all the fundraising, adoption, vet clinic visits, and social media work.
In the era of digital nomads and remote work, the lines between freelance, volunteering, hobby, and solopreneurship are not so clear.
This is why a personal Customer Relationship Management system is a broad term that describes software for all single users out there who need to organize their contacts, manage calendars, and handle meetings.
Key Features Of CRM For Individual Use
Like any software solution in this league, the fundamental functionality of the tool is contact management. Nimble Prospector extension takes this feature to a totally new level by providing an access to a heavily enriched profile of a user anywhere on your desktop: on the internet, in email, while using social media – as well as inside of the SaaS solution itself.
This is the list of major features of Nimble:
- Contact management
- Email marketing, automation, and tracking
- Calendar, scheduling, and reminder module
- Task management
- Deal management
- Pipeline management
- Social media integration & insights
- Reporting & analytics
How To Use Nimble CRM For Solo Entrepreneurs
Keep ‘Em Organized: Do Contact Management Like A Pro
Keeping track of everything is exhausting. Omni-channel communication is distracting. Moreover, it has one huge side effect: uncontrollable sporadic procrastination.
How many times did you go to check a message on your business account and ended up being stuck on social media? Too many, right?
Not an issue with Nimble.
We have integrated the social media insights into the platform, so it’s just one channel for you – not many.
Adding contacts is super easy with Nimble Prospector – you can do so in one click without lots of manual data entry.
To start using a CRM you can either upload all of your contacts from an excel sheet, another third-party app, or from your email account. Once you do that, the system will enrich your data with information available on the web, which entails dozens of data points, inclusive of contact details and company facts.
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Segment Your Contacts: Birds of a Feather
All contacts in your database get automatic tags based on demographic aspects: like location, company, age, gender, and more.
Say you want to send an eCard to all people who live in San Francisco. No problem. Just choose this parameter and group email to these peops.
Or, you want to address all people with the CEO in their title. Great choice. Just ask Nimble to sort that for you. Done.
Alternatively, you can create custom tags.
Say, you can create a special tag “Family” – so that to invite them all for Sunday Lunch in a click.
Or, you may want to create a tag “VIP” for the clients in the 7-digit income bracket. They may receive special offers from you or an invitation to a privately held party.
Or you can create a tag “retiree” if you are in financial consulting and need to be sending newsletters on pension plans to such clientele.
Once segmented, such groups of contacts can be mass-emailed, get similar invites, or even monitored separately via reporting.
Group email function: Save time, Every time.
Those email marketing solutions can get so pricey.
With GDPR law in Europe sending an email carries so much legal responsibility too.
Your database is your legitimate acquisition and business contacts that know you personally.
But once in a while you just need to send an update to all of your clients:
- You may be moving an office
- You are on a month of vacation and your clients will need alternative contact or recommendation from you meanwhile.
- You are rewarding your clientele with a low season discount.
- You came across an article in Bloomberg about the stock market situation, that a specific segment of your database will find interesting.
Whatever the reason you may wish as a solopreneur to send a mass email, Nimble has got you covered.
Not only that, we have an open rate tracking function too for some inboxes. So you can see who of the recipients opened your email and how many times they viewed it.
Plan Your Day Down To A Minute
Do you know how the biggest vice of being your own boss is having nobody to stay on top of you and keep you from procrastinating?
Nimble knows the pain.
We rely on our calendars like our life depends on them.
Because it does.
It’s quality anyway. The more business activities we staff into the day, the more money we get out of it. The better life we lead.
So we allow technology to beat the technological distractions by stuffing our calendars full of activities and sticking to them.
The best advice that we swear by in Nimble in terms of time management? Plan your next day at the very end of your current working day.
This is why:
- You still have fresh memories about what’s been done today and what needs completing.
- Priorities are crystal clear for tomorrow as an overspill of today’s activities.
- You will make a plan in no time at all as this is the last thing before going home and watching your favorite show.
- You can have the guts to put the hardest thing in your day as the first one on the to-do-list because mentally you have no reason to take mercy on yourself, as this is a distant future. Eating the frog in the morning is one of the top productivity tricks. This is so much harder to do if you plan in the morning.
- You start your day by mercilessly immersing yourself in the gist of the to-do-list that you compiled yesterday instead of spending your most productive time procrastinating and planning the work.
The Nimble calendar feature is expansive with activities available as a list and as a calendar; the possibility to schedule, postpone and cancel meetings; integration with all major calendar apps, like Google and Outlook calendar.
Task Management: Create A Flawless Workflow
Ok, we get it, as a solopreneur, you don’t have a team. But you may hire a freelancer to build a website or ask your partner to do something for you here and there.
The task management feature is an amazing way to discipline yourself as well as to assign a task to another person in your Nimble database.
You can schedule tasks, assign them to a deal or pipeline, send an invite related to it, postpone, mark done, or cancel altogether.
If your vendor or freelance helper is using Asana or Trello – no worries, you can quickly join accounts via Zapier for smooth data flow between the systems.
Integrate Your Current Software With Nimble
You may already have accounts in DropBox, Google Calendar, Twitter, and other systems.
Use Zapier, PieSync, or API to connect your old and tried technology with your new best friend in the realm of CRM: Nimble.
Make sure to check and choose the way of connection that suits your business needs best: choosing between one-way or two-way syncing can make the difference for your business.
Convert Data Into Dollars
Data is big. Big data is even bigger.
Any proper CRM for an individual should have proper reporting functionality. Even if you believe this is not important, as you have never seen a report before, please make sure you check out the analytical module when you try Nimble on your 2 weeks free trial.
You don’t have to be scared or deterred by figures. Even if you belong to a creative clique, the visuality of all those figures and trends makes the reports readable and comprehensive for anyone. However far from academics.
Do you know how you get put off by the screen time notification on your iPhone and then cut your social media consumption? This is what figures are capable of doing.
They make you realize you are going in the wrong direction. So you can timely adjust your trajectory.
Or they can make you see your forte clearly and build on that strength of yours.
Just as with physical health, a timely made diagnosis can end up in quick recovery of otherwise real nasty conditions, so in business, reporting, like an X-ray, can shed light on problems that need the fastest fixing to save the business.
Looking For Best CRM for Solopreneur? Try Nimble
We are not saying we are the best personal CRM out there.
But Nimble has been at the top of Capterra’s independent top 20 rankings of the Best CRM solutions for years. You don’t have to trust us; you can take the word of over 1500 genuine reviewers.
Nimble helps 140 thousand professionals across a wide range of industries with thousands of single users among them!
No wonder – our pricing is straightforward with no fine print:
- 14-days free trial with no credit card
- $25 per user per month if billed annually
- $19 per user per month if billed monthly
How many lattes do 19 dollars buy you? 4 cups?
Imagine saving 90 minutes per day in increased efficiencies for 4 cups of lattes a month.
You are not a corporate entity, we get it. You need a simple CRM. A Customer Relationship Management tool for freelancers or independent consultants. We hear you.
Nimble’s razor-sharp focus is on the system’s intuitiveness. It virtually builds itself for you. An extensive library of webinars will help navigate the system and reveal all of the best practices to optimize your workflow.
As a solopreneur, you don’t have to be left out of the technologically saturated world the corporations are enjoying. You can use all the same software solutions they do and use a similar arsenal to beat your competition.
Nimble CRM has been created with the entrepreneur in mind – if solo or a team player. We make your working routine a well-oiled machine, it needs to be to get you where you aim to get eventually.
Try Nimble for free for 2 weeks. Insert your email to start. Your business may be small, but your ambitions don’t need to be.
