Many businesses that our OMI team have helped deploy a CRM system in the past are tailoring their sales efforts and customer services better today. That is mainly because a good CRM and its implementation ensure that your customers have a positive experience and demonstrate long-term satisfaction with your company – benefits that are far outweighing its implementation cost.
And if you’re hesitating about whether or not your business needs a CRM, this article is for you. In it, we’d like to share our experience on the telltale signs of you needing a CRM system and how it benefits your sales.
Why use a CRM System?
A CRM system is an integrated set of apps that gather and maintain vital transactional, business, and customer data. It provides full visibility of known customer contact data, their status, the history of their touchpoints with your team and their purchase history. And it doesn’t stop there – any other additional data field your specialists may want to track and special notes they themselves made about the customer are also on full display.
With this functionality and more, your sales and marketing teams enjoy a more thorough and unified grasp of your customer profile, which results in more consistent messaging and better interdepartmental collaboration. On top of that, many sales processes become digitized and automated, allowing your specialists to focus on their core tasks, which accelerates sales cycles, and provides more effective customer service. Finally, reporting and forecasting on your revenue becomes much more transparent and detailed – with more insightful information that you could ever get with a CRM system.
Signs that you need a CRM
There’s an argument to be made that virtually any business with sales and marketing departments needs a CRM. But to be more to the point, here are some concrete signs that a CRM is a must-install for you as quickly as possible:
- Dropping Or Stagnating Sales: installing a CRM may not fix all your sales problems, but at the very least it will allow your sales team to concentrate on the prospects that are most likely to close by sorting, analyzing, and prioritizing your sales leads, while your marketing team will have the data, they need for promoting your business;
- Marketing And Sales Are Misaligned: sometimes sales and marketing specialists lack departmental coordination, which results in inconsistent sales pitches, misunderstood lead profiles, and wrong audiences being targeted at the leag gen stage. With a CRM, your teams can cooperate and exchange knowledge about leads, making the sales process well-structured, increasing sales efficiency and eliminating data silos;
- You Don’t Know Your Customers/Leads: without CRM-backed data, your customer profile building comes down to pure guesswork; on top of that, you don’t always know who your most important current clients are so you can’t nurture them properly by offering them special rewards and treating them a bit more personally, which would enhance their loyalty;
- Reporting/Forecasting Is Hard: if your sales reports and forecasts are manually produced Excel spreadsheets, that means that they take a lot of time to make, are likely to contain errors and may not track all vital info. A strong CRM system maintains data in a single, easily accessible location that makes a 360 degree, accurate, real-time reporting and forecasting automated, insightful and easy.
- Customer Service Is Lackluster: not having customer data a click away on demand leads to multiple customer-facing issues like slow response times, lowering retention rates and customer satisfaction rates. On the other hand, CRM will enable you to route customer tickets to the appropriate agents, use digital assistants or chatbots, use tools for knowledge management and digital customer care, such as live chat, video chat, phone, and co-browse features.
Why CRM is Important for Sales
Why use a CRM system altogether and how does CRM help sales? Let’s look at 10 main ways it can benefit your business:
Marketing optimization
It is good news that the digital world has increased the number of touchpoints with leads by tenfold, thus making it easy to connect with potential customers. But the sad news is that without a centralized and automated marketing effort, your business is likely to find it very difficult to convert leads to sales today. However, thanks to CRM, marketers can now optimize their marketing efforts.
Safe storage space
One more reason why CRM system is important is that it’s common to lose potential customers following a case of missing data, and this unfortunate event is costly to your business. The need to avoid such a mishap is a strong reason why CRM is important for your business today. With a CRM system, your sales team can have their sales opportunities (B2C, B2B, B2M, and others), contacts, and schedules centralized and safely kept in a place that is readily accessible.
Sales scalability
Without good sales, marketing is never effective. Thus, CRM for sales managers helps them run their sales process in a scalable way by ensuring that the experience remains the same irrespective of increased traffic and related real-time data flow. It allows the capturing of customer information and ensures that your sales team is following the right processes and staying on top of every lead.
Sales lead integration
Many businesses have found CRM software simple to integrate into their lead generation strategies. Besides, for enhanced customer loyalty, CRM offers fast access to vital information on customers’ purchase records and prior conversations with contacts across various platforms (email, chat, social media, etc.). So, whatever tools your marketing team uses, thanks to CRM the data on leads is easily available to the sales team to take over.
Time management and workflow automation
How does CRM increase sales? Professional sales teams use CRM to prioritize their tasks and optimize their schedules so that customers always get the needed attention on time. Your CRM system is the one-smart tool to handle all your time management demands. It can allow you to arrange a follow-up call or reminder, synchronize events, manage to-do lists, congratulate your biggest client on their birthday, or whatever else. Using a CRM system with inbuilt automation capabilities, you can scale your sales processes and customer retention initiatives much better. Moreover, using a CRM tool, you can eliminate unnecessary repetitive administrative actions. For example, you can use it to automatically update and store details about products and prices, schedule reminders, and guide your sales team through where prospects are in the sales process and the respective deadlines for closing every deal.
Report preparation
The process of preparing weekly or monthly reports or presentations ahead of a management meeting is usually not an easy one. However, with CRM, this is way easier and faster today, thanks to automated reports, interactive and customizable dashboards and visualizations.
Audience segmentation
While targeting is about being aware of the customers you want to reach and devising the best way to contact them, data segmentation is about splitting and organizing the details you already have about your customers into smaller pieces of data or market segments. It enables you to reach out to a subset or subgroup of your customers. A CRM for sales reps helps them to organize and categorize data about leads and customers quickly and easily using features such as data fields, filters, cross-referencing, and others.
Communication tracking and analysis
CRM allows access to aggregated interactions between customers and marketing, sales and customer service teams on multiple devices and channels. Businesses find this data useful for both quantitative and qualitative analyses. Moreover, they can measure customer satisfaction and capture insights into product or service pain points, customer preferences or what they wish they had received through text mining and sentiment analysis. For example, different businesses can use CRM to determine the words or phrases customers mostly use in describing the quality of experience they are having with the brand and the emotions attached. Through this kind of analysis, machine learning and artificial intelligence technology allow identifying different emotions expressed in textual data and classifying them as negative, neutral, or positive; or into more specific emotions such as fear, anger, anticipation, disgust, joy, surprise, sadness, and trust.
Customer knowledge and value-tracking
The usefulness of CRM in ascertaining what customers really want and anticipating issues they might have with products and services is another benefit of CRM for sales managers. In addition, CRM allows managers to track the lifetime value of their customers. It helps them see where and who the leads are coming from and what value these leads are driving. This way, businesses can invest more in the customers and channels that are producing the desired results. Moreover, modern CRM systems can help prioritize leads, allowing sales managers to work more efficiently.
Save money and time
Another point on why CRM is used is that it helps companies save money and time. A CRM tool helps your company save money by automating routine tasks, such as data entry or reporting, that otherwise would require employing more staff to do, thus getting the job done at faster and cheaper rates. Examples of these CRM tasks include but are not limited to automatically keeping customer profiles up to date, eliminating misplacement of invoices by flagging them for prompt follow-up, and fostering customer satisfaction and repeat patronage. Besides, due to its multifunctional design, CRM also helps businesses save money that they would otherwise have spent on licenses of other software.
Conclusion
The importance of CRM system is unquestionable for modern businesses, as it helps optimize sales workflows, automate marketing campaigns, streamline reporting and gain insights into customer behavior. The ultimate benefit of CRM software is that it allows driving customer satisfaction and increases revenues for your business. CRM managed services experts at OMI specialize in implementing, administering and integrating Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRMs. Reach out to us for a consultation on what CRM solution is best suited for your company. We’ll help you evaluate your CRM needs and existing infrastructure and come up with a plan for a smooth adoption of the CRM of your choice.