You probably have heard the term “customer relationship management” before – but do you know how to optimise the process with the right tools?
Considering that CRM applications can help increase sales by up to 29%, it’s important to understand how to use this technology to nurture buyers down your sales funnel and continue the relationship once the deal has been closed.
At its core, “customer relationship management” is a strategy for managing potential and current customer relationships through collecting and analysing data. Typically, however, “CRM” refers to customer relationship management as a software.
CRM solutions are used to collect, store, and organise information about customers, and they has evolved over time to generate automated workflows and reports. This allows businesses to enhance performance and deliver world-class customer experience with their brands by freeing employees to act on what really matters and to prepare for the future.
Modern businesses are investing heavily in these technologies to drive automation and productivity for optimal results and revenue. CRM is at the heart of any business success, as it helps improve both inward-facing team management and outward-facing customer experience.
So how can you take your business to the next level with CRM?
Many daily activities take a significant amount of time to review and execute. With automation, team members can easily set up alerts, dashboards, and automated messages for enhanced productivity.
While marketing automation software is designed to help marketers efficiently deliver content, CRM software is designed to help sales and customer service professionals track and manage their engagement efforts with customers.
CRM automation capabilities include:
Many CRM solutions offer functionality that streamline processes between marketing and sales teams, creating better synergy between opposing organisations.
When it comes to reporting, creating dashboards and spreadsheets that are up-to-date, accurate, and meaningful can be incredibly time-consuming. This is why allowing your CRM to automate your reporting is one of the most effective ways to improve your business.
Many comprehensive CRM options on the market have excellent reporting capabilities. Some also have native integrations to pull data from other key apps, giving you and your stakeholders a valuable, big-picture understanding of your business’s progress.
CRM systems store and organise consumer data, making it easy to share with various people in your company. Creating and distributing information or data about current clients or new customers is a large benefit of implementing a CRM system.
By collecting data in one place, you can share data across locations and departments. This helps in eliminating errors, streamlining processes, and generating automated alerts for greater efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Not only does the collection of this information help you to be more organised, but it offers valuable insight into customer behaviour, which helps you to improve campaigns and increase customer retention.
A CRM gives you a holistic view of how your marketing, sales, and service teams are performing, giving you more information to better outline Key Performance Metrics such as customer service case management, opportunity movement within the sales pipeline, customer sales over geographical regions, salesperson performance, and more.
These visualisations bring your business to life, and help you to better prioritise and improve your customer relationships by offering what they need through the right channel of communication.
You can use data from your CRM to identify trends that are common to each customer’s journey in order to build an accurate customer journey map.
This helps you gain visibility into customer activity at each touchpoint, and from there, what your sales, marketing, and service teams can do to improve at each step. From there you are in a better position to plan, monitor performance, and forecast sales pipelines for greater business growth.
CRMs can provide business improvements across all levels of an organisation. The first step to adopting the right CRM system for your business needs is to identify the top challenges facing your business and find the solutions that will bring the greatest results. This will help your team better adopt and carry momentum through the next phases of your CRM implementation journey.
Want to learn more about how to taking your business to the next level with CRM? Read about how to choose the right CRM for your business by downloading our FREE guide, “The CRM Buyer’s Guide and Checklist” below:
