Putting customers first has always been a success mantra for businesses for a long time now. In fact, becoming a customer-first company is something that is a top priority of every business today.
Since time immemorial, business and sales leaders have been leveraging a mix of tricks and tips to acquire and retain customers to keep the sales cycle spinning. Customer relationship management or CRM system is one such tool that is widely used by organizations across the world to drive sales and maintain a lasting customer database. CRM software helps organize all your customer data into a single and unified database. This helps salespeople in responding to customers in a much faster manner, pulling out required customer data in no time and much more.
CRM has been a cornerstone behind the sales success stories of numerous companies. Unfortunately, the market is bombarded with an excess amount of inept information pertaining to CRM tools leading to more confusion and chaos than clarity thus, demoting its core advantages that it can bring to a business irrespective of its size or vertical.
Here’s how CRM can help a business turn into a sales powerhouse:
- Drives Marketing Efforts
A CRM system helps to eradicate the guesswork when it comes when determining the interests and preferences of potential customers. Further, it helps to determine the factors that are fetching more leads/prospects than the ones that are repelling. Now imagine the plight of a salesperson to determine the services/products that a prospective customer might be interested in from a long list of products manually. It is next to impossible, isn’t it? Having a CRM solution handy would help the marketing team get a clear picture and data pertaining to customer behaviors, buying patterns, trends, etc. all from a single dashboard thus, helping to devise effective and targeted marketing strategies.
- Drives Customer Success
For any business, a dissatisfied customer means loss of revenue. Further, a dissatisfied client or customer would never recommend your service or product to others. Now, this is something that can take a huge toll on a brand’s repute thus, disrupting sales. CRM system on the other hand by providing a bird’s eye view of all the leads, prospects, opportunities, communications, queries, etc. puts you in a better position to serve your customers. Sales professionals can choose to leverage this data to better serve their customers leading to improved levels of customer satisfaction.
- Shortens Selling Time
For any sales rep, a usual day is nothing but gathering and locating information, following up or chasing leads/prospects while jumping from one system to another to get the required customer details. Unfortunately, many do not deem time invested in these tasks as time wasted. The fact is that such admin chores are often tedious and eat up a lot of time and efforts of a sales rep, which can be invested in other important chores. Also, these tasks often keep the sales reps away from performing their prime duty i.e. selling. A CRM system can automate such tasks thus, eliminating the need or hassles of performing such admin chores manually saving a good amount of efforts as well as time for sales reps thus, enabling them to devote on what matters the most i.e., sales.
- Drives Collaboration
A bunch of employees that collaborates well can go a long way. Simply put, when a pool of diverse proficiencies and talents come together to work on a common goal, the result is increased sales and customer satisfaction. Not to forget, improved brand loyalty as well. A business failing to keep all its employees on the same page invites chaos and mess in terms of enterprise data (data discrepancies and duplication). Worst case, customers end up getting varied info from each salesperson every time. Now such kind of inconsistencies can thwart away potential clients as well as existing ones from a business. Good news is that CRM software helps keep everyone on the same page thus, no room for data discrepancies and duplication. For example, a CRM system allows each sales representative in the company to view every single point of contact or communication made by the prospect/lead with the company thus, helping them serve customers in a much better and prompt manner. So when a lead calls in, all the sales reps have the same data/info related to that lead helping them offer better customer experience. Eureka! Improved customer engagement, anyone!
Takeaway
So this is how a CRM solution will not only turn a business into a powerful sales hub but also would save a great deal of time and efforts thus, allowing you to focus more on product innovation and marketing strategies. Lastly, yet importantly, CRM is no magic wizard that will get going on its own, since it’s all about how a business uses it to stay ahead of curve.
Author bio:
Anwar Shaikh writes about the cloud, artificial intelligence, IoT and all things enterprise technology such as ERP and CRM systems. A writer at heart and Digital Marketing Manager, Anwar writes for Sage Software Solutions Pvt. Ltd., a leading provider of cost-effective CRM software to small and mid-sized businesses in India.
