Sinking in a Sea of Customers? Swim with CRM
CRM is a strategic approach to detailing and maintaining relationships with current and potential customers. Proper use of CRM tools streamlines your customer pipeline and pivots your business toward success. Let’s take a deeper dive.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is the method through which companies maintain relationships with customers and establish leads with new ones. Customers should be the focal point of your business’s journey. That being said, the tools we use to manage our relationships with customers should be a crucial component of how our businesses operate.
As simply stated by Salesforce the goal of CRM is to,
1. Archives of Data, Centralized
Looking for a post-it note you wrote about a customer 3 months ago? Can’t find it?
To that, we say–good luck. The age of post-it note memory is a thing of the past.
CRM software serves as a data storehouse that prevents these kinds of mishaps. Abandon the days where you sought for that missing post-it like buried treasure.
Zoho CRM, HubSpot CRM, and Salesforce Sales Cloud Lightning Professional are just a few of the CRM software tools recommended by premium providers online. Instead of scribbling notebooks filled to the brim or compiling local files that continuously disappear, choose software to centralize your customer history. These programs store names, addresses, purchasing histories and customer habits all in the same place.
2. The Synchronization of Marketing and Sales
Alignment or balance between marketing and sales teams is incredibly difficult to tackle. From an outsider’s perspective, many assume that marketing and sales are one roll, swaddled into one, simple bundle. But, that’s just not the truth.
The reality is that these roles operate in slightly different avenues. Although they are similar in some regards, the marketing and sales departments require differentiation of unique roles. Sources report that the
“misalignment between sales and marketing technologies and processes costs B2B companies 10% of revenue or more per year.”
For SMB and SME that’s a portion of your cash flow that you can’t afford to lose. CRM provides a medium where marketing professionals can store data for sales representatives to access. Notes on customer and target profiles can be stored in the cloud CRM system. This increased accessibility to files improves communication between sales and marketing departments. The time that a sales representative might spend trying to find a lead or unearth customer history can be categorically and efficiently organized into a CRM system. These softwares foster a culture of clear communication in your business that increases synchronization between teams. Moreover, other statistics show that,
“when sales and marketing teams work together, companies see 36% higher customer retention and 38% higher sales win rates.”
Build sales, increase retention and streamline communication by dutifully managing your customer base with these tools.
3. Generating New Leads
A result of increased communication and efficiency in accomplishing tasks related to your customers is the freedom you’ll have to pursue new leads. You’ll never make the arduous climb to reach new customers if you’re always stuck in the foothills of managing the old ones.
Organization as an offset of CRM will provide you with the extra time you need to foster and cultivate relationships with new customers. As you form those new relationships continually input information about those new customers into your CRM service or software. In this way, even if the potential lead is passed to a different sales rep, the preexisting information on that lead will already be consolidated, centralized and accessible.
For more tips on CRM, customer relationships and discovering your target audience, explore customized marketing strategies with Robotic Marketer. Step into the future of affordable marketing and allow us to do all the research required.
