If you are working in the corporate sector, you must have heard about CRM before. Several companies use CRM software as it helps them drive their sales and saves time.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a software used by businesses to help their team and individually by maximizing their sales efforts and customer communications. Remember that CRM is not a glorified address book. Through this, your team can build long-lasting relationships and provide the customers with the best end-to-end experience.
Earlier, CRM could only be afforded by the big enterprises. It was a complicated software that was difficult to use. Today, organizations of different sizes are using affordable and easy-to-use CRM software. According to an article in Forbes Magazine, CRM is expected to reach more than $80 billion in revenues by 2025.
How can CRM software help your business?
When you first started your business, you must have used email, spreadsheets, and address books for tracking your customers. But, the business is growing now. This means that you have new opportunities for changing the way you run the company. Here is why sticking to the old methods can be an issue:
- Updating, interpreting, and syncing spreadsheets with the team is hard.
- Employee’s inbox contains valuable information about the customer.
- There is a chance that notes can get lost.
- The communication with the customer can be inconsistent between employees.
All your data is dispersed across multiple people and systems. This makes collaborating on sales and leveraging information difficult. CRM can help you with this.
- Consolidate all your customer data in a single location
With the CRM software, you can centralize the information of the customer so that all employees can access the information from a single platform. Here is what you can do with CRM:
- Customer Information – Looking for customer’s phone numbers, email addresses, mailing addresses, social media platforms, and websites.
- Communication History – Tracking all the interactions through phone calls, emails, tickets for customer support, and online chats.
- Customer History – Referencing the customer relationships’ length, history of purchasing, and how you found the customers.
- Sell faster and better
The biggest challenge for improved productivity for the sales team is doing manual data entry. With CRM, all these repetitive tasks will be automated so that the team spends more time selling and less time typing. CRM can also create a standardized process for the sales team that gives them a roadmap to close the deals. Here is what an appropriate sales process can offer to the business:
- Improve the sales methods
Through the sales processes, you can get the data required for identifying the main reason why deals are stalled. It even gives you the information about how you can take steps for addressing the problem and makes sure that the team is focusing on revenue-generating activities.
- Predicting the sales
When you have an accurate idea of the win rate, the sales managers can depend on it for forecasting the number of sales the team will be able to make from the given leads. This helps in setting realistic goals.
- Training new hires quickly
When you have a standardized process for sales, it helps in training the new sales representatives faster. This is a simple and foolproof method for showing the sales team what they should do at different stages of the process. Once they have an idea of all the steps involved in the sales process, they can easily make an impact.
- Better experience for customers
In some cases, a sales representative might push a potential customer into a stage they are not ready for. This can result in dead deals and damaged relationships with the customer. When you have a process, it ensures that the sellers are not advancing until the customer is ready.
- Focus on the customers
When you have information about the behaviour and interest of the customer, the sales representative can take advantage of the right opportunity. They can even collaborate with the marketing team for delivering useful and targeted content to the prospects. This way, they can make selling a personalized experience focusing on the customers.
With the CRM data, you will be able to anticipate the needs of the customers. This way, the support team solves the customer’s problems instantly and keeps them happy.
Who benefits from the CRM?
All the teams in your company interacting with the customers can benefit from CRM including marketing, sales, management, and support teams.
- Sales
All the teams working in the organization that are responsible for interacting with the customers can benefit from CRM. This includes sales, support, management, and marketing teams.
- Sell Smarter – With the CRM software, sales representatives can conduct their communications regarding sales and manage their deals from a central location. This way, sellers won’t be wasting their effort and time switching from one program to another.
- Don’t lose a lead – CRM allows you to automate the reminders so that you never lose a potential customer. It can take a lot of stress and guesswork from your day.
- Stay connected – You can access cloud-based CRM systems through any device and any location.
- Marketing
- Learn how customers can find you – CRM allows you to track how the prospective customers are finding your business. This can be through specific campaigns, trade shows, and online searches. Marketing teams can use this function for understanding the concerns of the customers and for creating relevant content.
- Engaging the customers – CRM has a lot of data that can help the marketing team in turning leads into customers. There are marketing tools integrated with CRMs that can help the marketers in creating landing pages, email campaigns, advertisements, and forms.
- Customer Support
- Personalizing the experience – When you have customer data and their interaction, the support team can provide spectacular customer service. By access to all the notes, the team can deal better with the customer.
- Solving issues faster – When a customer gets a fast response to their support request, they have a satisfying experience.
Using a Sales CRM software can help the management measure and grow their business. It is a great software application that provides multiple sales opportunities, forecasts, and trends. The right CRM software can unlock the hidden potential of your sales team and enhance business profits.
