If you were to ask any entrepreneur how vital customer relationship management is to them, they would certainly stress that it’s the backbone of a business. It can make or break a company. No matter how big or small your business is, it will crash and burn without a robust customer relationship.
A sure strategy your sales and marketing department can use to improve customer relations is to embrace and implement Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. If this is your first time to hear about it, CRM software is a tool that helps businesses organize and track all their interactions with customers and prospects thus enhance customer satisfaction.
In this post, we will explore eight ways a CRM system can help you improve your business and remain competitive in today’s cutthroat business environment. Let’s dig in.
Automate routine tasks
Imagine the many leads that come into your business each day and the little tasks that eat up your time. If your sales team was to keep track of them manually and update their status, half of your productive day would be long gone before you know it.
A CRM system comes with features that help you automate routine tasks, enabling your business to concentrate on other profitable tasks that will help your business grow. Routine tasks, like filling out order forms and reminder emails, among others, can efficiently be handled through automation.
What’s more, CRM software boosts your business workflow by automating tasks that require speed and accuracy. Automation can also help you cut on costs by reducing overheads.
Take Nimble for example. Nimble works for you by automatically combining your contacts, communication histories, email inboxes, and calendar appointments with over 160 SaaS business app contacts and social media connections (Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook) into one unified team relationship manager.
Streamline your sales process
Secondly, most CRMs have a lead management tool to help businesses effectively manage their leads. What this implies is that you can track your prospects from the point of entry to the point of conversion and even further.
You don’t have to worry about leaks in your sales funnel because all the leads coming into your system from any lead source are accounted for. You can easily check how each lead is interacting with your business and at which stage the lead is at.
Wait for it! Some CRM systems even allow you to predict the closure of a certain lead.
Compared to other static tools like Excel sheets, CRMs offer much faster and easier ways to execute business functions, especially on large scale businesses.
Prioritize your lead calls
With hundreds of thousands of leads in your system, prioritizing on who to call first can be quiet a hassle, especially when you don’t have sufficient data about them. The challenge here is that you may end up spending a lot of time on leads with minimal value and lose out on the big fish.
CRM software comes in handy in enabling you to prioritize on the most promising leads. This can either be through setting them a lead score, grouping them in a list or tracking their activities. With such detailed organization, you can easily interact with your leads accordingly.
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For example, you can follow up the hot leads to close the deal soonest and offer the warm leads incentives to keep on interacting with you. For the cold leads, you can nurture them through emails and other promotional content to hopefully make a sale at a later date.
Nimble’s brand new Activity Listing feature enables you and your team to schedule and log calls with more granular details than ever before by providing you with a comprehensive table of scheduled and completed activities. The table columns can be configured to quickly see which data is important to you. Additionally, activities can now be exported.
Customize your customer interactions
Tailor-made customer interactions ensure your customers keep coming back; hopefully with their friends through word of mouth marketing. However, most leads are known to be reluctant in sharing their buying intent. Since you are not a magician to read their minds, it can be difficult to know what your customer requirements are in the current marketplace.
A CRM system helps you identify which pages on your websites are visited more and how much time is spent on such pages. Through sales tracking and lead tracking features, you can even track the kind of conversations prospects have with your sales team.
This way, you can know their interests and customize your interactions to their liking. This is the easier route to turn a lead into a sale.
Make your teams more transparent
Many a time, friction among your workforce comes around when an employee feels like they are being treated unfairly or there those being favored. One major source of dispute in a workplace can be the assignment of leads.
What a CRM system does is automate the entire process of assignment of leads, making them visible to all employees, eliminating any possibility of favoritism. Employees get to see that the process was impartial, and they also get to see the progress of each team and why the best team is appreciated.
Harmony at a workplace increases productivity. With a CRM system in place, preferential treatment is kicked out of the door as all customer-related processes are visible.
Additionally, Nimble unifies your entire team’s inboxes, calendars, contacts, and more to create a seamless experience that is then translated to better customer service at scale.
Get detailed analytics on your sales process
To improve your business operations, you need to know what is working and what is not. A CRM system comes with powerful analytics features that help you see the effects of your sales activities.
These analytical features help you find the best lead sources. You also get to see how your email campaigns and drip campaigns perform together with gauging the performance of your employees. You can even know which customers are giving you more revenue.
Some of the vital reports a CRM system can generate include; lead status report, initial response time report, call log report, total sales report, and most profitable service offering report. With such data, your business can make effective decisions that can boost your growth.
Monitor progress of ongoing tasks and campaigns
Besides generating detailed analytics on your sales process, you can use your CRM system to monitor the progress of ongoing campaigns in real-time. This means you can easily monitor the progress of each task from the beginning to the end.
A CRM system helps you know when a task was assigned, and when it was started. You also know to which team it was assigned and when the customer or client received the final output.
Monitoring your employees’ interactions with your clients goes a long way in increasing accountability. Also, it reduces the chances of important things getting sidetracked. If something goes wrong, you can easily identify the issue and swing into action before it becomes a serious problem.
Empower your sales team with Nimble’s clean and simple deal pipeline. Nimble automatically ties your team’s tasks, events, and communications to each deal to ensure everyone is on the same page with each of your opportunities.
Increase customer retention
Ever heard a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush? Well, a CRM system is designed to help improve your customer retention rates even as you hunt for new customers. A survey done by Harvard Business Review indicates that increasing customer retention by 5% can boost your profits by 25% to 95%.
CRM software keeps you abreast with your customer’s behavior. You get to know your customer’s purchase history. You get to know how they responded to your marketing campaigns and which marketing campaigns worked best.
With such data, your team can effectively address at-risk accounts. You can also reach out to your happy clients at the right moment to encourage repeat purchases.
Final word
In today’s digitally-driven business environment, business owners need to adopt efficient solutions such as a CRM system to generate tangible benefits for their enterprises. From automating your business functions, streamlining your sales process to enhancing customer relations, there is so much a CRM system can offer your business.
If you are looking for an ideal CRM system or curious about what this technology can do you for your company, contact us today, and we’ll be happy to help.