CRM, or Customer Relationships Management, does what its name suggests by effectively managing the relationships between your company and your customers.
The term encompasses all the strategies, techniques, tools, and technologies used by companies in order to develop successful strategies for the ultimate purpose of customer satisfaction. Whether you are a small business needing to grow or an established company and your sales team seems to be losing steam, a CRM is highly recommended.
92% of businesses said that CRM is a crucial tool in achieving their revenue goals. (SuperOffice, 2021)
If you remain on the fence, here are 6 reasons why having a CRM will encourage growth and success in your business.
1. Organise your entire sales strategy effectively
Identifying and following up on leads has just become easier. The biggest advantage of a CRM solution is that it accompanies your sales team throughout the sales cycle of getting your customer interested and keeping track of that interest.
Getting a customer on-board
Your CRM will store and manage information from a prospective customer, and help your team find new customers faster by assisting your sales team. Not only will it boost your sales team’s ability to close deals, it can also help your service team make more customers happy with intelligent help desk solutions and your marketing team understand each individual customer’s needs.
Keeping Track of your relationships
A CRM will keep track of your relationship with a new customer, from signing up, to gathering information, and closing in on further opportunities. Practically, a CRM will remind your team to stay in contact with a customer at regular intervals to encourage product adoption and stay on top of support tickets.
Impressing a customer with the effectiveness that a CRM can provide will ensure a long-lasting and recurring relationship as you will understand their needs before they have to ask for them to be met.
2. All your customer information can be found easily
Your business is booming!
However, having a flood of new customers and projects might mean struggling to keep up with all the incoming information. CRM solutions are vital for businesses mainly due to the enormous amount of data that they manage daily. CRM exists to address this challenge by modernising the process of acquiring and managing this data.
Traditionally, any information acquired from a customer would be entered into a multitude of places -in spreadsheets, notebooks, various emails or even Post-Its. However, customer centricity is essential to business success, and following up shouldn’t be left up to where you left a piece of paper. Important details such as remembering when to follow up with a customer can be easily lost or forgotten. This essentially fractures relationships with the business.
CRM solutions will keep all your customers’ information via a central repository. These files can grow and develop with new data as your relationships flourish. Each interaction with a customer such as emails, contracts, offers and phone calls will be centralised in one place for your convenience, enabling you to stay in the know for each customer.
3. Your team will always be on the same page
Due to the central nature of a CRM, your whole team can access customer information. In the past you may have used spreadsheets, email, and sticky notes to relay information about a particular customer to members of a team, but as your business grows, so must its technological tools.
Traditional tools limit your team’s visibility into customer interactions, as well as your ability to make informed decisions quickly. Having one platform to work on for your team means everyone will be saving time and effort trying to access scattered information. This can truly drive sales success rates and increase customer maintenance.
4. You can integrate the rest of your technology
Your CRM solution can be integrated with the rest of the software that your company utilises every day. It even integrates with the social media platforms you use. Cloud-based CRM systems offer complete mobility and access to a variety of different apps. This plays a vital role in facilitating team communication, tracking of support tickets, phone calls, live chats, and emails for each client. You may use it to plan appointments and stay on track with deadlines by comparing it to your calendar or where your customers are in the sales cycle. Because both your customers' information and your team's schedules are pooled on a single platform, your team may use your CRM for guidance.
Additionally, smart CRM solutions enable you to spread knowledge and skills acquired to customer service agents by routing cases to the appropriate agent and assisting agents with shared knowledge while answering inquiries. You can also develop self-help forums to allow clients to research solutions on their own, allowing agents to focus on more difficult issues.
5. You’ll have better tracking and accessibility
CRM has grown to its magnitude because of its accessibility. Businesses need to have access to their customers' data information in real-time. With mobile and cloud solutions CRM software provides this. Your team members can be in the office or on the road but you and the rest of the team will know how they’re performing and what your customers generally experience. The tracking ability of CRM informs you what’s going on with your business from the ground level. The mobility of a CRM solution allows you and your team to update details from a mobile phone to ensure everyone remains informed and can act immediately, if necessary for the benefit of your customer.
6. Of course, your money will grow
But how do you know if a CRM system really is a worthwhile investment for your business specifically? While converting new leads is critical, client loyalty is where the real money is made. Customer acquisition costs five times as much as simply focusing on your existing clients (ElasticPath, 2015). Meanwhile, a 5% increase in customer loyalty can result in a 95% rise in profitability. According to Finance Online, the steady increase of the CRM market share in recent years is as a result of its money-growing properties. However, a significant number of sales teams have yet to implement this technology.
The global customer relationship management (CRM) software market is forecast to grow to 43.5 billion U.S. dollars in size in 2024. (Statista, 2021)
CRM software's main goal is to improve interactions between businesses and their consumers. By resolving these issues, you will be able to concentrate on your company's connections with customers, colleagues, and suppliers. This entails attracting new clients and offering ongoing support as well as additional services.
These are the kinds of problems that a customer relationship management system is designed to solve. It converts customer data into usable, actionable intelligence that can help a company transform. It allows everyone in a company to easily update data and access the most up-to-date information. If the system is cloud-based, they can do so from any connected device, no matter where they are.
How can you get on-board?
CRM technology will be the single largest revenue area of spending in enterprise software. If the aim you have for your business is to grow and succeed, you know that you need a strategy for the future. For forward-thinking businesses, CRM is the framework for that strategy.
For guidance on acquiring a CRM that works for you and your team, contact Demodia, Europe’s leading digital marketers. Through our offices in Switzerland and the UK, we provide businesses with the strategies and content businesses need to deliver innovative marketing programmes that nurture interest and deliver increased revenue.
Demodia is more than just a regular digital marketing or media production agency; we partner with some of the leading marketing automation and web experience management vendors to enable us to deliver a structured demand generation service built around our demand generation framework.
