The key to success with customers is understanding and catering to their requirements. This is exactly what a good CRM could help you do. Used properly, CRMs can help you improve customer-business relationships, retain old customers, and find new customers.
By collecting, organising, and maintaining information about customers, you can transform the way your business communicates with them. Before exploring the benefits of CRMs in depth, let’s understand what a CRM is and what CRMs are available in the market.
What are the most common features offered by CRMs?
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. Colloquially, or in marketing and sales terms, CRM refers to a system used to manage customer relationships. The most popular CRMs available, such as Salesforce, offer features such as contact management, lead scoring, email integration, workflow automation, and analytics.
Ideally, business owners and sales managers should choose a CRM software that offers each of these features so that you can maximise your CRM investment.
Benefits of a quality CRM
So, what benefits can your business experience with the use of a good CRM?
- Increased business revenue
By storing customer data in an organised manner on a dashboard, you can increase the revenue generated by your company greatly. Here’s how.
Through CRMs, you can track the success of sales workflows and optimise them. You can reach your marketing campaigns to new audiences, and determine the best products to sell and how to sell to your customers.
Using a CRM, you can also segment customers and figure out the best campaign type and content for each group of customers. You can also maintain data on what products are sold to each customer so that you can target them with new offers and products.
- Optimal cross-selling and upselling
If a customer has made a purchase in some category of your offerings, it’s very likely that they are interested in a higher version of the same product or a new product in the same category. When managing multiple customers, keeping track of this information can be tricky.
With a CRM, you can easily track this information and use it to upsell premium products to high-potential leads (old customers who have already proven interest in a category). You can also sell new products to customers by deeply understanding their needs, concerns and hang-ups. This can be done by interacting with customers, keeping detailed records of their information and using it to cross-sell products.
- Improved internal communication
When you have a team working with a group of customers, creating a seamless experience can be challenging. Customers don’t appreciate having to communicate their needs and challenges over and over to different people. By using a CRM, you can record important information in an organised manner, and share it easily to all the people who require it.
If you have a team with each member having different levels of clearance, that’s fine too. Most CRMs, especially the ones mentioned above, allow you to create multiple accounts and provide different levels of access to each of them. You can also create events, appointments for customers and update the progress in notes.
- Save customer interaction costs
If you are working with different groups of employees across geographies or industry types, CRMs can help you save money. Initially, you may spend time and money on setting up a CRM, but once that is done, your team can access information about customers and set-up meetings with customers.
You can also ensure that events and progress are updated, so you don’t double-tap the same customers with meetings, emails or other communication.
- Optimise marketing efforts
Marketing and sales efforts go hand in hand. Many businesses separate their marketing from sales, only to increase the effort that their team has to put in to experience the same results. Through CRMs, you can track email marketing campaigns, which are known to add to sales, along with your direct sales efforts. Through CRMs, you can also keep track of alternative sales efforts such as webinars and eBooks through which you sell products to customers.
Personalised customer interactions will only become more important in 2019. Without a CRM, personalising interactions with multiple customers can be challenging. Choose the right CRM to improve your customer relations and sales.
Setting up a CRM system for your business efficiently can be a daunting task, but engaging in a specific CRM experts, like SalesFix, can take the headache out of the process and amplify your business.
