When you have a robust customer relationship management (CRM) strategy in place you’ll have a system you can depend on to manage all your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and prospects. This is imperative for businesses who are operating in today’s digital world because it helps you improve your customer relationships. By making these improvements you’ll be able to increase customer lifetime value and your revenue too.
These are just a few of the things your CRM system can help you with today. This software tool will help you with contact management, lead flows, email workflows, sales management, and productivity. Today’s businesses need a high-functioning CRM system to deal with the large amounts of information that gets created daily. This data stems from people submitting enquiries via your website, opening email your marketing department has sent them, picking up the phone to talk to your customer service department, and having in-person meetings with you. Every time your customer performs any of these actions new data is generated. This is data from which you can learn something new.
Unfortunately, most of this data will remain on someone’s personal computers in the form of a Word document or a spreadsheet unless you’re using a CRM. You’ll also lose valuable data that’s stored in your staff members’ heads where it’s easily lost or forgotten if it isn’t in your CRM. Of course, none of this can be viewed or analyzed for insights either.
When you have a functioning CRM system at work behind the scenes, storing all your information in one place, making it accessible when it’s needed, you can easily gain useful and actionable insights. As you glean these insights you’ll be able to transform a mediocre business into a successful one. In fact, research shows that companies with a working CRM strategy and system can increase their revenue by as much as 41% per salesperson. They can also improve their lead conversion rates by as much as 300%, improve their customer retention by 27%, and decreased their sales and marketing costs by 23%. These are just some of the reasons why you need to start developing a CRM strategy.
Shared Goals and Expectations
CRM software integration helps your employees work well together as a team. They can use it to generate common ideas that help reduce any bottlenecks in your business. This is beneficial for your business managers because they can now understand what the requirements of your customer base are.
Improve Communication
Converge Hub says excessive interdepartmental emails and wasteful meetings between your sales and marketing teams are two major distractions for your marketers. It’s easy for miscommunication to happen here, which often results in interdepartmental conflicts. However, when you have CRM software in place everyone can become much more efficient in their jobs because they’ll have focused tracking reports available to help them understand what sales and marketing tactics are truly effective for your company.
Avoid Duplicated Efforts
Software’s automation benefits helps both your marketing team and your sales team see the same big picture. Everyone on both of these teams will know exactly where each of your prospects, visitors, sales, and marketing qualified leads stand when it comes to their own personalize buying journey. This will help your marketing department tailor their marketing contents and generate automated email campaigns that will help your sales professionals better focus their outreach on those customers who are genuinely interested in your products and services.
Use Your CRM System Across All Departments
Cope Sales and Marketing says there are also many businesses who have a CRM system that they’re not using to its full capacity. This typically happens when you have a CRM strategy that doesn’t only help just one specific department achieve its goals, but that’s truly inter-departmental. However, this is the most beneficial type of CRM software to have because it can track your potential customer right from the moment they first subscribe to your blog or newsletter to the moment when they become a full-fledged paying customer. Your marketing department will benefit from this just as much as your sales team will. This is because you’ll be able to glean insights from everywhere in your business so you’re better informed about when the best time to post content is, as well as when you need to reach out to your contacts or hand off a lead to your sales department. Simply put, your CRM system can and should be used to help every employee in your business do better at their jobs.
Prioritize Your Prospects and Customers
The business world is not a democracy. While you may want to try treating all your prospects and customers as equals, you can’t do that. If you want to run a successful business, you must be willing to learn how to prioritize your customers efforts. Something that’s backed by research, is that repeat customer requiere the same (or more) attention than new customers. They’ll typically spend nearly double what your new customers spend and save you money that you’d otherwise spend throughout the acquisition process. Every company will need to create its own unique way in which to decide which of your customers and prospects are most valuable though. Once you do manage to determine what these specific traits are, you’ll want to put your CRM software to work for you. You can use it to segment your contacts into priority groups.
Remember to Always Analyze Your CRM so you can Continue to Improve
Your CRM strategy really is no different than all the other aspects of your business. It’s not something that you should expect to be perfect when you first implement it. This is why it’s important for you to be flexible. You’ll need to actively mine your data to determine where you can make changes and improvements. By understanding what’s ineffective you’ll also be able to know what’s effective. This is a good thing because then you can work to optimize your processes as you move forward.
