Your customers’ journey and how a CRM solution will increase sales and help company culture.
In your CRM, you will be able to plan your course of action. Rather than rely on a spreadsheet, planner, or (heaven forbid) a Rolodex, a course of action can be laid out every step of the way. This will allow your sales team to focus on closing, rather than expending time doing paperwork.
Your team can easily identify and follow up on promising leads. It will remind you to stay in contact with a customer at regular intervals to encourage product adoption and stay on top of solved support tickets. Lastly, monitoring a customer’s involvement with your business can help your team identify opportunities for cross-or up-selling, thereby organically growing your business while helping customers succeed.
All of this means getting closer to your customers, being proactive, and keeping your finger on the pulse of individual customers’ needs and expectations in order to better satisfy them. Implementing a CRM solution can drive customer retention and mitigate churn. The entire customer journey is tracked in your CRM solution, visible to your whole team and accessible for reference every time a specific customer gets in touch. Your CRM solution can become the hub around which your entire sales strategy is organized.
Inter-departmental cooperation
Since your CRM can gather all types of information, it can be a rallying point for the different departments in your company. Coordinating sales, support, marketing and development is a tricky affair, and without smooth cooperation between those teams, the customers are the ones to suffer and churn.
Lack of inter-departmental cooperation is the source of many pain points for customers. You can use a CRM solution both to assign tasks and see how those tasks fill out the bigger picture. Thanks to a common interface, everyone can access and add to the information. Consequently, you can empower your staff to work collaboratively rather than concurrently, by sharing insight, leads, issues, and solutions.
Moreover, sharing information, goals, and incentives across your business improves productivity and efficiency. With the right CRM solution, you can avoid siloing information and help all departments work like a well-oiled machine.
Marketing and Campaign Management
One of the most essential features of a CRM is marketing automation. They go hand-in-hand, so most CRMs offer marketing automation modules or have the ability to connect seamlessly with the top standalone marketing automation solutions. When you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of contacts at different stages, this will save you loads of time.
You can also create, deliver and track multi-channel marketing campaigns. Marketing automation comes into play by having all website and campaign activities available within your CRM interface and dashboards.
Marketing tools also include customer targeting features that offer a 360-degree view of prospects and leads, allowing users to segment them into a range of customizable categories.
Your CRM solution should track customer data like spending habits, likes, dislikes and other attributes to better qualify them. This data can be used to drive targeted marketing campaigns. Campaign analysis tracks campaign delivery and analyzes ROI for individual campaigns to improve future efforts.
What are your goals?
Establish what you want to accomplish with a CRM solution. This is the first step in making the most of your CRM software. Without defining what success will look like for your business, you won’t know how to evaluate your own usage and performance and run the risk of missing the forest for the trees.
Possible goals: Improve your customer journey
Improve your customer service (a part of the journey but different than the customer journey)
Reduce customer churn
Better understand and refine your sales process
Help your sales and marketing team become better organized and more efficient
Develop a more effective lead generation strategy
Improve inter-department cooperation
In accordance with the objectives, you’re aiming for, your CRM solution needs to provide the right data for you to draw meaningful conclusions. CRM software comes with different levels of customization. One solution may fit you right out of the box or perhaps you will need to tweak it.
In the end, your team members are the ones to get the most use out of your CRM solution, so it needs to suit them well. It needs to be easy to learn and easy to use. The more intuitive the software, the quicker your team will have a handle on it and be able to use it as a trusted tool. A major pain point for CRM usage is that users resent having to manually update their files. If team members don’t feel confident with the software, they won’t use it or won’t get the most of it, and your business will suffer.
The CRM market is expected to reach more than $80 billion in revenue by 2025. This is because CRM tools are considered to be one of the cost-effective tools to acquire and retain customers. If you’re interested in your target audiences’ location, preference, spending habits, demographics, feedback, engagement with your brand and other such vital information, investing in a smart CRM is a wise decision. With all that said, in your search, be sure and check out HubSpot. It is easy to learn and easy to use and has several levels of customization. You can even start for free.
