Successful businesses are built on establishing long-term sustainable relationships with potential and existing clients, ensuring loyalty and retention. Though there are a wide number of technological tools available for business owners to help them build these relationships, it is important to have a unified approach to the various activities, strategies, and technologies that streamline your resources while providing maximum returns.
Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, is at the heart of these efforts.
When your business is new, it may be possible to run it on spreadsheets or simple apps, since customers are few and business operations are easily manageable. However, to achieve growth, your business will require a comprehensive approach to streamlining the entire business.
A CRM system empowers business owners to focus on the relationships between the company and the various players, such as clients, employees, vendors, etc., throughout the relationship’s lifecycle.
It enhances every single area of business operations whether it is business development, customer service, sales, marketing, or anything else. No wonder CRM has become the most indispensable tool in any company’s arsenal and is expected to grow to $94.4 billion by 2027, at a CAGR of 11.3%. The recent pandemic and subsequent changes in how we live and work are sure to accelerate the adoption of CRM.
Advantages of CRM for growing your business
An efficient CRM will have a significant impact on almost every employee in your organization, from salespeople to marketing teams to customer service executives. Here are the most important advantages your business can get with an efficient CRM:
1. Streamlined business with a centralized database
At its core, CRM systems help business owners gather and organize data from potential and existing customers, analyze the data for patterns, and deliver insights to ensure effective decision-making at all levels of the organization.
This includes data from existing customers, data collected through digital marketing, physical marketing activities, and even referrals. Centralized customer data helps customer-facing teams instantly access every customer’s interaction history with your business, so their issues can be quickly resolved.
The unified view offered by the CRM helps teams work with each other as they can monitor the real-time status of different business operations. It further helps business owners evaluate their strategies to achieve their sales goals.
2. Exceptional Customer Service/ Retention
According to a Microsoft report, 54% of global consumers say that they have higher customer service expectations than they did just one year ago.
It is crucial for businesses looking for growth to understand the customer’s journey and ensure that they are being catered to at every stage. With a CRM, you can accompany them on this journey at different touchpoints, and offer relevant information to move them to the next stage.
As competition in the market heats up, it becomes imperative for you to not only attract new customers but also address the challenge of retaining your existing customers. In fact, a Salesforce report details that 68% of marketing leaders believe that customer experience is where brand differentiation occurs. It is no longer enough to inform the customer, but rather, you need to deliver delight to nurture brand loyalty. CRM provides a 360° view of every customer so you are able to quickly respond to their requirements whenever the need arises. Moreover, customer data provides you insights into their patterns so your teams can plan accordingly and deliver for maximum impact.
3. Personalized marketing
Almost every marketer will agree that email marketing is one of the most important tools in digital marketing. The main reason for the effectiveness of email is the degree of personalization it offers when businesses interact with potential and existing customers.
Customer data provides significant insights into their behavior, preferences, requirements, etc. which helps businesses to craft relevant and compelling communication. A July 2020 report by LinkedIn shows that 47% of marketers have increased their focus on human-centric and emotional content. The same report also reflects the marketer’s preference for direct customer outreach as the most effective way to attract and engage potential customers, to increase retention.
4. Automation
More than 80 percent of marketing automation users agree that CRM implementation increased their leads.
Companies have their own processes in how they handle the different aspects of their business. These include several repetitive tasks that require a lot of time from employees, such as data entry, lead generation, and even administrative tasks. Moreover, manual data entry will almost certainly include human errors, leading to bad decisions or incorrect strategies.
CRM software includes automating these processes, thus saving time, and providing inbuilt analytics to help you make sense of the data. It tracks every customer interaction, records sales processes, and enables accurate forecasting of revenue generation.
With several modules such as lead management, opportunity management, contact management, reporting, and email marketing management, a CRM automates most of your sales and marketing processes so your salespeople can focus on revenue-generating activities rather than on administrative tasks.
Sales automation is considered one of the most significant advantages of a CRM since it enables businesses to collate, measure, and analyze data from different areas. This helps you make better decisions regarding work prioritization, resource allocation, and strategizing better.
In marketing, automation strengthens prospect discovery and lead generation. Mapping out the customer journey process shows any gaps where you are losing customers, which can be addressed when you are creating your strategy.
5. Higher employee productivity
When different teams use different tools for their processes, it creates discrepancies and redundancies in your business data. Individual employees also have their own working styles which makes it difficult to evaluate their contributions without defined metrics that reflect their performance.
A CRM is invaluable for salespeople to understand the efficiency of their efforts. Whether they are fumbling in communication, ignoring follow-ups, or wasting their efforts on low potential prospects, without data, they will not be able to improve their performance.
For salespeople, a complete record of calls made to customers, the number and quality of follow-ups, and communication channels, are all important pieces of data that highlight weaknesses in customer conversion. Employees tend to work better when you can provide the relevant data and insights which empower them to achieve maximum success.
Reporting capabilities in the CRM enable business owners to review how different teams are performing, and monitor the progress of the organization as a whole.
6. Attract and convert leads
Growing your business requires you to focus on bringing in new leads and increasing your client base. In fact, this is one of the most important factors which determines your rate of success.
CRM helps maximize the impact of a business’s sales and marketing efforts at every stage.
Data from existing clients, such as their interests, preferences, or pain points provide crucial insights on which you can develop targeted marketing and advertising campaigns for potential customers. A CRM gathers lead generated through every channel and help you track their progress through the buyer’s journey.
The next step, qualifying the leads (for example marketing qualified leads that are collected through marketing), ensures that you are prepared with the right approach to maximize your chances of conversion.
Qualified leads can be assigned to different team members through the CRM, and you can follow their progress from your dashboard. You can prioritize the leads based on your preferences such as potential value, or depending on where they are in the buyer’s journey.
Irrespective of the business you are in, increasing the number of leads and the rate of conversion is important to grow your business.
By accompanying your leads on the buyer’s journey and engaging them with the right strategy, you can maximize the chances of conversion.
Conclusion:
CRM is indispensable for any business to function and succeed. More than 91% of companies with 11 employees and higher are already using CRM to stay ahead of the competition.
The reasons for its popularity are numerous, and as technology keeps improving, business owners can look forward to better features to help them become more successful. The idea of a CRM is to make sure that an organization can focus on important activities, and let technology help with the administrative functions. CRM is simply a must to enhance customer service and grow your business in today’s dynamic markets. Nevpro is the best CRM company in India. They also provide best CRM software for small businesses.
Hope you like the article and got to learn about the importance of CRM. Let us know your favorite part of the article in the comments down below.
Author Bio:
Mr. Mihir Shah is CEO of Yatharth Marketing Solutions which offers Sales Training Programs, Sales Consulting Services, Leadership Training Services, and Entrepreneur Training Services. Mr. Mihir Shah is also well known as India’s best sales trainer and India’s best sales consultant.
Mr. Mihir Shah is the only trainer who offers customized training and consulting solutions to their clients, also to date, Mr. Mihir Shah has served 10 lakh+ individuals and 650+ corporate companies to solve the training and consulting-related hurdles.
