There comes a point in the life of business owners where daily information may seem like it is lost through gaps and a bit out of control. This is where CRM can make a dramatic, yet easy to implement, difference.
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It’s a system designed to do just that: manage relationships with your customer: log customer data, tag them as a lead, prospect, or loyal customer, then prioritize next steps in your business
You may have your faithful Excel spreadsheets at hand, but have you ever found yourself searching for a shipping address through your emails? Or struggled to contact a customer whose phone number had been changed? This is one of the beautiful things about CRM systems. Anytime you get new customer information, you can update it in one place and one place only. No more scattered sticky notes. Everything is centralized, whether you work alone or with a team of 100. While in Outlook, Act! Contacts can be created and calls scheduled.
This is a problem that grows exponentially with the number of salespeople at your company. Every new agent might have a different way of doing things, which can lead to data silos, and make you feel like you’re out of the loop. CRM software is a powerful centralization tool. Every customer interaction can be logged, tracked, monitored and sometimes automated.
Email, phone, social media, support ticket, live chat, messenger apps…. There’s no shortage of communication channels for your users these days.
The only problem? It can make it harder to keep track of who said what, when, and where.
History of all interactions with customers, prospects, and leads, is streamlined helping with support, marketing, and sales. Best of all – you can still give customers all the options they want. The key point is that it all ends up in the centralized CRM database.
Customers may voice frustrations over your communications with them. Maybe there’s not enough information.
Perhaps they resubmit the same details numerous times. Or been in touch with multiple agents, all of whom told them different things.
This is why having all your customer data in one place can be a lifesaver. No more cross wires when it comes to reaching out to your customers, no matter how many sales or support agents you have: they all use the same database with the same information. And it all gets updated effortlessly.
Updating multiple systems involves manual data entry tends to be time-consuming and error-inducing. You might find yourself with duplicates, typos, many misspellings for the same word, can cost your business time and money.
With CRM Landing Pages on your company website, customers can enter their own information that automatically imports into your CRM as new or updated information. It’s fast, efficient, and with notification on entries.
Reporting on data is seamless when creating reports. Since all your information is in one place, reports can be in-depth, filtered, and tailored to only focus on the critical information, such as closed deals per quarter, status on negotiations and project or policy status.
With CRM, you can list customers based on how much they have spent with your organization, their yearly budgets, or which recurring products they might need. This helps to anticipate their needs and bring in more business when your sales agents can upsell, cross-sell, or simply strengthen their relationships with them by accessing the right data.
If you’ve got more leads coming in than you can manage, CRM systems are again excellent at prioritizing. Your team can become more independent by listing leads in order of importance, delegating to the right sales agents, or simply being more proactive in contacting the right person. If you’re concerned about sales agents stepping on each other’s toes, don’t worry. You can add comments and notes in your CRM software and assign permissions or sales territories with managers overseeing the full database.
As your business grows, communication issues will increase. With standardized workflows in place in your CRM, there is no confusion on most recent communications. Centralization is vital here, as all the communications are kept in one place and easy to manage in the form of tasks and reminders, with automation of the Account Holder Record Manager.
A CRM platform saves time, which means fewer expenses on administration and management. Using the right CRM tool also allows you to onboard more staff with fewer training overheads, as they only have to learn one dashboard instead of several. Similarly, you only have to deal with one vendor instead of several, which saves time and resources that can be allocated to what matters the most: growing your business with complete peace of mind.
There comes a time in the life of every organization when growth needs to be handled smartly. You might have too many business leads, or too many sales agents to really get a sense of what’s happening. Or you might find that your support is overwhelmed with customer requests for better service. While CRM tools are first and foremost used for managing customer relationships, they can do so much more, including improving communication, unifying departments, and saving you time and effort on manual tasks.