Customer Relationship Management (CRM) helps businesses reduce operating costs and increase sales. Managing customers, products, marketing, and sales can be overwhelming regardless of your business’s size or scale. There are many moving parts. Luckily, technology has stepped in to make the process more manageable (and more transparent).
Regardless of your industry, seeing the granular details and the big picture will help you plan for the future. Plus, you can manage processes in the long and short term. That’s where CRM comes in.
CRM is an all-in-one solution to help companies stay connected with their customers and improve profitability while helping to streamline work. Not everyone is aware of how extensive a CRM system can be.
Key CRM Benefits:
- Plan activities and tasks ahead of time
- Log everything from interactions with clients to contact details ·
- Share information electronically
- Template processes
- Generate reports
- Create email campaigns
- Improve communication
- Predict trends and buying patterns
These elements are a value-add to any department, from sales to customer relations. Here are some of the top areas where CRM can help control and lower operational costs:
Sales
CRMs are a sales rep’s best friend. Sales teams can plan tasks ahead of time (automating reminders and notifications). They can see historical sales numbers that predict future sales and discover ways to up-sell or cross-sell products and services.
CRM integration can help sales reps be better at their jobs. Reports show their past sales numbers and highlight where they’re succeeding to help hit upcoming sales targets. Since CRMs allow for the storage of vast amounts of contact information, rich leads can be recorded and mined to ensure there’s always a pipeline of new clients or customers for reps to target and close.
CRMs also allow for sales to seamlessly integrate with supply chain management. Sales reps using a CRM can see how much inventory is available, to ensure order fulfillment. This increases customer satisfaction and eliminates the possibility of a vendor canceling a contract due to a lack of product or backorder status.
Customer Service
The importance of customer service in fostering strong client trust can never be overstated. Businesses that are great at it have a higher likelihood of customer retention and larger referral numbers. CRM systems can make customer service super simple with the ability to record details, including preferences and complaints.
They can also automate processes for escalating issues, empowering customer service reps with tools to handle various customer queries. Logs of phone calls with clients give invaluable insight to reps, who can see a client’s entire history at the click of a button without having to refer to other teams first. This reduces friction when resolving client issues and minimizes conflict resolution to minutes instead of days or weeks.
Marketing Automation and Relationship Management
Did you know CRMs can automate your marketing outreach? By being able to manipulate customer information, CRMs allow companies to focus tailored messages to specific clients and potential customers. This is possible due to the power of segmentation within CRM solutions.
Marketing teams can create content that speaks to individual clients and shares valuable information that ultimately helps grow the relationship between the clients and the company. Moreover, due to a CRM’s ability to parse and analyze data, marketing teams can create a “success blueprint” by studying and replicating what has worked according to historical data.
Once again, with the processes automated, and the ability to template campaigns, reaching audiences big and small becomes a breeze. Finding what works through data analysis is done with just a few clicks, which lowers marketing man-hours drastically.
Campaigns have become more targeted and more effective, allowing marketing dollars to be laser-focused on only the right areas that can increase sales numbers.
Forecasting
Businesses can often struggle to predict trends or buying patterns. Getting the data wrong can be very costly for a number of reasons. CRM software collects all manner of data to project buying patterns that can analyze everything from spikes at certain times of the year to regional upticks.
This greatly assists in the company forecaster’s understanding of where inventory is needed and when. It can also help target marketing initiatives, so your marketing budget is used more effectively where and when it will make the most impact. Remember how sales teams could see the stock on hand? Now, not only can reps see how much inventory is available, suppliers can project how much inventory will be needed.
This ensures production isn’t over or underestimating how many units to have at any given time, ultimately saving money on storage and manufacturing, with the bonus of lowering the likelihood that a vendor will pull a contract due to lack of fulfillment.
Mobile CRM
Cloud-based CRM solutions offer mobile access to essential customer data. This is crucial for sales reps and executives that are out in the field and need access to real-time information.
When a customer calls, you want to have the latest details on their account regardless of where you are. Ultimately, the power of a CRM system is in its ability to hold and parse large amounts of data integral to learning more about your business.
What was previously guesswork can now be studied and analyzed, saving man-hours by allowing teams to focus on the areas that matter. Investing in CRM software enables companies to reduce spending on unnecessary software licenses or programs that don’t have an “all-in-one” appeal because they don’t have the flexibility to work across multiple departments.
CRMs can simultaneously standardize processes that tie teams together and help a business work as one cohesive unit.
