Maintaining customer relations, retaining customers, and attracting potential customers is the mantra of success for every business. This is a mammoth task if done manually, and the possibility of leaving broken strings is aplenty, which could affect the growth of your business. The advent of CRM came as a huge relief to companies. Technology could never have been so good for scaling businesses as it is now because of CRM.
The customer relationship management (CRM) tool has rid companies of the cumbersome task of maintaining records and interactions manually. CRM is the buzzword today, helping you get more leads, better closures, and personal interactions. Catching the pulse of the market, many CRM service providers plunged in to meet the growing demands from companies. During our quest to feature some of the best SaaS companies, Maple CRM stood strikingly away from the crowd. With its cloud-based CRM solutions, it has given a tough lead for its competitors. Headquartered in Bengaluru, India, the company tapped the clientele that needed CRM solutions but was not getting the desired service provider.
What Makes Maple CRM Different
Maple CRM is a cloud-based Business and Customer Management Solution built exclusively for small and medium businesses. It is suitable for both product and service sector companies. While most CRM solution providers targeted bigger companies, Maple chose to be different, realising the need of small and medium businesses. No wonder the company is trusted by 500+ customers in India and abroad.
Their sales and service solutions range empowers growing businesses to become more productive, efficient, and profitable. Maple CRM enables business owners to meet changing business needs by attracting, engaging, and delighting customers. Maple CRM can work as lead management software, quotation software, invoice software, workflow management software, task management software, AMC management software, or ticket management software, both on mobile and web, for every business.
The Dynamic Leader
Mr Joe Mathew is a Solutions Architect and Product Manager with over 22 years of expertise in all stages of the technical product life cycle, including – business case development, product definition, product architecture/design, customer/sales support and product delivery. He completed his post-graduation from the University of Madras.
Mr Mathew worked as a software engineer at Accel Software Solution. Later in 2002 he joined as Technical Specialist in NOKIA until 2012 and became Product Line Manager for the LTE-PCRF Product, NOKIA.
He has vast face-to-face customer experience with a proven ability to work closely with them to understand and successfully address their requirements and issues. He possesses exceptional interpersonal skills enabling, building, and nurturing relationships with multiple stakeholders. He has strong international onsite experience working together with teams in US, Canada, UK, and APAC regions.
Urge to Serve All
Mr Mathew says that modern business has made technology a great partner in its success and one of the most popular and sought-after partner is the CRM software. The customers are the asset and pathway to greater profitability for any business. He observes that many companies spend millions of dollars trying to get new customers while they could have spent a fraction of that cost retaining them.
“The main objective of the software is customer relationship management. The automation of business processes is no longer just a luxury for larger businesses. Instead, it is rapidly becoming essential for companies of all sizes to ensure continuous success. This thought gave me the strength to introduce Maple CRM.
We make sure that we are updated day by day to ensure our clients’ luxury feel. The ultimate goal of Maple is to introduce and implement business automation in small and medium businesses,” shares Mr Mathew.
Exceeding Expectations
At the heart of every business is its customers. They can be considered their lifeline. When these relationships sour, businesses risk being left out or, worse, losing everything. That’s where CRM comes into play. Maple focuses on having the best and top qualified people, and it ensures continuous updation of software by analysing the trends in business. This focus has helped Maple to exceed its clients’ expectations on every deal.
It doesn’t matter how big or small the business is, the customers are the ultimate asset of every business, and Maple will help your sales team to be in touch with every customer. So, you can have complete trust that every customer of yours is in your hand, and no one will drop out because of lack of attention.
The name of the game is efficiency, and this can never be achieved manually. Maple has all the possible features to automate the needs of small and medium businesses.
Conqureing Challenges
It was in 2009 that the story of Maple CRM started. Back then, in India, Cloud meant just the cloud and the Cloud Applications were meaningful only to enterprise companies.
Maple CRM built the application mainly focusing on small and medium corporates and for those who understand the advantages of SaaS applications but are unable to migrate to one of them due to cost and complexity reasons.
Indian SMEs are facing some of these challenges in the adoption of a CRM even today, such as unfamiliar user interface, not being familiar with the CRM jargons, feature overload and not having good training from CRM providers.
However, Maple CRM tries its best to eliminate these basic challenges and makes it pleasing even to the entry level sales and service staff of every customer those who come onboard on their platform.
“We focused on developing the UI and application as simple as possible to make the life better for small companies and their sales folks. One of the biggest problems we faced then was that people aware of CRM software were significantly less in number.
People know that manual data entry kills the valuable time of every business, but they were not ready to get out from their traditional system. They always try to stick to manual data entry because they believe in a myth that CRM implementation is costly. Yes, of course, CRM implementation is a little costly, but people don’t even think about long-term advantages,” says Mr Mathew.
Braving the Pandemic
As with any other business, the pandemic also affected Maple, but its strong team was Mr Mathew’s strength. The company had a drastic drop in sales, but the team effectively managed and supported all the existing clients. The team never had work from home experience earlier, but they did not even skip a beat. They were dealing with software that did not even need any physical presence of the office. It only required a device to log in and efficient people to work with that.
“What makes me amazed is how fast my people got settled with the new work culture and how productive they were even after a sudden change. They ensured all our deliverables to our clients were sharp and accurate even in that situation,” shares Mr Mathew.
On the sales part, even though Maple had a drastic drop in sales initially, the pandemic led to a significant jump in its business over the last few months. During the pandemic, more people came to know about the necessity of automating their business, and that is what CRM Software is made for.
A Sound Advice
For the young generation of entrepreneurs, Mr Mathew advises that first they need to be passionate about what they are doing. He adds that this is a piece of advice not only for entrepreneurs but for everyone.
“If you just scout around your surroundings, you could find a lot of people who know what to do but they don’t do what they really wanted to do. Always nourish your passion with new ideas. Do your best at every job, don’t sleep on it. If your passion is true, you will find a way to make it happen,” emphasizes Mr Mathew.
Looking Ahead and Beyond
Maple has been able to increase its turnover from year to year. The development of the last few years shows a clear picture that it is growing. The COVID-19 pandemic had both positive and negative effects on the company. Mr Mathew shares that they struggled a bit during the pandemic, but everything has been moving in the right direction for the last few months.
He recollects that 16 years back, CRM was a new subject for people. He says that even today, around 10-20% are using some form of business solutions, not knowing the advantages of CRM and how productive it could be for their business.
“Businesses are becoming bolder and more open to what technology can do for them. They are going online, and more people find ways to earn money, like an internet side income, and improve their operations with today’s technology. Now we are on a mission of making Maple an ultimate software solution for all small business needs. We are restlessly taking inputs for that and focusing more on the continuous updation of software. The ultimate goal of Maple is to become an evangelist making people aware of the advantages of CRM. We wish to make every small and medium business convert from its traditional method to the path of automation. We want small and medium businesses to reach out to Maple fearlessly and understand that it is not very expensive,” states Mr Mathew.
Predictive View
CRM software is one of the most rapidly developing technologies. According to the laws of economics, it means there is demand for it. In the last couple of decades, the meaning of CRM changed to CRM Software. Some years earlier, it was predominantly used by the large enterprises and was also limited to the basic functionality. Now the scope of CRM has increased from a mere customer database to a 360-degree view of customer interactions.
SAAS plays a very big role in increasing the number of users. The expensive CRM software became available as a service, affordable to almost everyone now. The internet revolution played a very big role. The availability of internet made accessibility of CRM Software very easy. Now, it has become one of the biggest productivity tools for sales and service teams.
