CRM, also known as Customer Relationship Management plays an important role in the increment of your business sales. Although CRM is defined as the process of maintaining good relationships with your clients, there are still various factors that are essential to keep in mind. If you want to get the most out of Customer Relationship Management, you must first define your CRM objectives and goals clearly. Good customer relationship management can provide various benefits to both your company and your customers.
Introduction to CRM
CRM (customer relationship management) is a collection of
methods, strategies, and technology that businesses employ to manage and
analyze customer interactions, data, and interactions with other clients over
their entire customer lifecycle. The goal is to strengthen customer service
connections while also assisting in customer retention and driving sales
growth, among other things.
Challenges faced by
businesses
Without adequate administration, a customer relationship
management system (CRM) can be reduced to little more than a glorified database
where client information is maintained. Data sets must be linked together,
disseminated, and arranged in a way that allows users to quickly find the
information they want. If a company's data sets are not integrated and
structured in a single dashboard or interface, it may have difficulty achieving
a single view of the customer.
Problems might also develop when systems include duplicate
client data or information that is out of current or inaccurate. Customers'
perceptions of service quality may be negatively impacted because of excessive
wait times on phone calls, incorrect handling of technical support cases, and
other concerns
What does a CRM
system do?
CRM systems collect customer information from a variety of
channels, or points of contact, between the customer and the company. These
channels and points of contact include the company's website, telephone, live
chat, direct mail, marketing materials, and social media platforms, among other
things.
CRM systems also provide precise information to
customer-facing staff employees about their clients' personal information,
purchase history, purchasing preferences, and other concerns.
How CRM helps in
increasing of sales
The usage of customer relationship management (CRM) systems
can help organizations ranging from small businesses to huge corporations in
increasing their sales in the following ways:
·
Through Enhancing customer satisfaction:
Customers who are pleased with their purchases are more likely to return, and they
provide positive word-of-mouth advertising, which can be extremely lucrative. Making
customer experience the primary goal of your CRM strategy is the most effective
method to increase your sales. This can be accomplished by encouraging higher
customer participation with social networking sites and different mobile
platforms. Consider integrating surveys or developing an interactive blog to
get feedback. By actively requesting feedback from your clients, you will be
able to discover which actions and activities will result in them being more
satisfied with the services or products that they have purchased.
·
Expansion of Customer Base: It is
crucial to realize that customer relationship management (CRM) is not limited
to managing existing clients. A customer relationship management system (CRM)
that is integrated with a high-quality knowledge management platform will allow
you to keep in touch with prospects with who you have not yet gotten in touch. It
will also enable you to uncover commonalities and links among the clients that
you already have, allowing you to fine-tune and strengthen your future outreach
efforts. Even in a seasonal sector, a broader client base will allow for more
consistency in profit margins over time.
·
Boost team productivity: Centralize
your multi-channel sales platform, fully automate lead creation, assignment,
and nurturing process. Make it easy for team members to collaborate seamlessly
to ensure quick conversions.
·
Capture leads effortlessly: Capture
leads and sales inquiries from websites, emails, social channels, phone calls,
and trade fairs. Assign leads to the right sales rep, faster. Automatically
assign leads to agents based on location, deal size, availability, language, or
other preferences.
·
Gain actionable insights - Use CRM insights
to get real-time visibility into your team’s performance and make data-driven
decisions. Visualize the most important metrics such as case resolution time,
team workload, customer satisfaction ratings, and more to quickly identify
bottlenecks and respond to them faster. Schedule reports to convert raw data
into actionable insights and find quick solutions to common help desk issues.
·
Go after the best leads: Leverage
Lead Scoring to identify the best leads you can pursue and prioritize follow-ups.
·
Never let a deal slip through the cracks
- Smart alerts ensure that you are notified about tasks and updates associated
with a deal. You can pick up a conversation right from where it was left off,
regardless of the channel, it was started on.
·
Respond instantly to generate more
conversations: Nurture leads with automated email and SMS campaigns.
Analyze campaign performance, open rates, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes to
tweak your messaging and targeting.
·
Scheduling meetings with ease -
Schedule meetings in a single click without the hassle of back-and-forth
emails. Pre-meeting reminders minimize the chances of a no-show.
·
Visualise your pipeline and discover
insights - Gain deeper insights into your pipeline, open deals, territory
performance, and much more with sales insights and custom reports. Schedule
reports getting them delivered right into your email inbox
Typical Features
of CRMs, which help:
·
Contact Management - Know Your
Contacts Better - With an actionable 360-degree historical view into every
engagement they've ever had with you
·
Get up to speed in seconds: Sales
CRM shows you a complete history of your relationship with leads and customers.
In their contact record, you will find their personal information, notes you
have written, and emails and calls you have exchanged with them. In addition,
if you have attached a file, sent them a quote, or engaged with them in any
other way, you will find it there too, so that you can learn about them faster
and take action sooner.
·
Know when to act with idle contact,
activity, and other notifications: Sales CRM ensures that you are always in the
know with on-screen, SMS, or email alerts that notify you if a contact becomes
active, idle, or meets various other conditions. Do this for contacts assigned
to you or your team or select individual contacts to receive notifications for.
·
Calendar Management - Events,
Meetings, and Calls - Stay on top of your commitments with detailed tasks and
calendar events. Not yet ready to reach out to a contact? Create a task to
follow up with them later. Or if you’ve already scheduled a meeting, create a
calendar event. Tasks and events are linked to the contact’s record so that
their information is just a click away.
·
Lead & Opportunity Management -
Sales CRM helps you focus on the right deals, automate repetitive tasks,
forecast accurately, and crush your sales targets. Stay on top of all deals
with a visual pipeline - Visualize, organize, & manage deals with
customized views & filters. If your CRM provides, then Leverage Kanban to
get a snapshot of your deals and the stages they are in. You can drag and drop
as deals progress. Create your own Views and choose the data you want to see
with advanced filters. Save customized Views and share it with your team. Follow
a deal you are interested in for priority updates.
·
Deep dive into each deal, effortlessly:
Everything you want to know about a deal in a single place - deal size,
decision-makers, touchpoints, expected close date, and more. Gives a unified
view of the Activities done by all the collaborating partners, documents
related to the opportunity, comments posted by team members, etc. required by
the sales personnel as handy information and be effective.
·
Quote, Sale Order & Invoice Management
- Sales CRM allows the creation of quotes, sales
orders, and invoices directly from the opportunity screen. While it provides a seamless
flow of the process of creation of quotes, subsequently a sales order based on the quote, and finally an invoice from the sales order, it is flexible and allows the creation of invoice directly without generation of quote or sales order.
·
Knowledge Base - Fast Answers to
Previously Asked Queries - Provide prospects and employees with fast answers to
common questions by building a private and public knowledge base by converting
common sales queries to FAQs. If a question resolved in a case may come up in
the future, convert the case to a knowledge base solution for quick access by
employees and customers
·
Workflow Automation - Automate your
team's repetitive tasks, enabling them to spend more time helping customers.
·
Trigger actions based on changes to a Lead
– You close a Lead when you think the lead has matured to be passed on to a sales
representative. Sales CRM can automatically
create contact and organization records for the first-time lead. Rules can be
configured to auto-assign leads and opportunities to specific teams based on
attributes such as domain, territory, etc.
·
Documents & Files - Centralize,
share, collaborate on, track, and optimize marketing and sales documents. Help
sales and marketing get important information to prospects and customers faster
by uploading often-used presentations and whitepapers to CRM. From there,
salespeople can search for them using any document metadata, or share them with
customers in one click at email attachments.
Customer relationship management systems (CRM) perform best
when organizations invest time cleaning up their current customer data to
reduce duplicate and incomplete records before supplementing CRM data with
other sources of information.
Click here to follow this blog!
