What is a CRM?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is, in its most basic form, a database that collects and stores data so that the departments within your organization can work with that data. CRM’s are often composed of an integrated suite of applications and the experience is often tailored towards specific roles within your organization such as marketing, sales, service and reporting. CRM software is one of the most important sales tools in sales reps’ arsenal and is frequently more than a contact management system often containing automated workflows and business processes to help guide your team to success. A properly structured CRM can help you analyze your sales process and help you figure out where it failed or broke down. If used to its full capacity, a CRM allows sales reps to spend more time with customers and potential customers, increasing the number of deals which are closed, and ensuring that loyal customers remain. Companies of all sizes will benefit by using a fully integrated, cross-functional CRM solution.
Signs that you need a CRM
Are you are struggling to keep up with the business?
A CRM can sort, analyze, and prioritize your sales leads so that your sales team can focus on the opportunities that are likely to close and provide accurate answers to customers—quickly and efficiently—and your customer service team has the information they need for upselling and cross-selling.
Are your customer profiles difficult to build?
If you cannot locate all your customer data points, all you can do is guess when it comes time to build your ideal customer profile. Not only that, you will have no visibility into your sales team’s activities. To find out this information, you will have to hold more status meetings, taking your salespeople away from customers and exacerbating the issue.
Are your response times slow?
If your customer service reps are reacting to customer issues and not proactively working with customers, it’s time to invest in a CRM tool for your service team, one that can give you a unified view of your customer so that reps can offer spectacular service.
Are marketing and sales collaborating effectively?
Since a good CRM can hold all types of information, it can be the rallying point for different teams. A lack of cooperation between departments is the source of many customer pain points. They’re forced to repeat themselves. Promises made to them slip through the cracks. No one seems to know their history. Without smooth cooperation between all teams, customers will leave. Aligning business processes between sales, customer service, marketing, and even some back-office roles (such as billing, inventory, or logistics) is a tricky affair. But if all the components of a CRM share a common data model, all employees can access, use, and add data. They can work collaboratively and share insights, leads, issues, and purchase history. When information is shared across teams, productivity and efficiency skyrocket, data silos disappear, and your entire company appears as one cohesive unit to the customer. You have just built a data-driven organization.
How to choose the best CRM
When your data is organized and managed by a CRM platform, you have a more comprehensive understanding of your customers, which, in turn, leads to more aligned messaging. Many activities (both behind-the-scenes and direct interactions) can be digitized and automated, which helps you target your marketing efforts, speed sales cycles, and deliver better, more efficient customer service. Finally, with a fully integrated CRM, data silos are removed, making cross-departmental collaboration easy so that you can present a united front to customers.
However, rarely does a CRM work out of the box for an organization almost all companies require some level of customization to make the data format and business processes align with how your business manages its customers. At the end of the day, its really not about the CRM platform you are choosing, it is more about how the software is configured and who is configuring it for you, and that means you will need a good consultant like Kataraxtis Solutions if you want your CRM project to be successful.
Questions to ask when evaluating a CRM
- How configurable are the forms?
- Can the CRM be integrated with existing technologies such as Finance System, Marketing System or a Web Portal?
- Does the CRM offer Digital assistants or chatbots to handle low-urgency, high-volume questions and route cases to the right agents?
- Does the CRM provide Knowledge management tools to help agents answer questions and can be used for customer self-service assistance?
- Can business processes and workflows be integrated into the system?
- How easy is it to make changes to things like document templates and workflows?
- Does the CRM solution provide easily configurable reporting dashboards?
CRMs need to support your customer experience. Every interaction based on CRM creates an opportunity for your customer to have a more personal, compelling experience with your company. It’s also an opportunity for you to build brand equity, improve satisfaction, and make more sales. And that’s how you create customer loyalty and increase revenue.
What do CRM systems provide?
Database & Warehouse
CRM is really just a fancy way of referring to a centralized database which contains the information that your business works from on a daily basis. CRM’s can contain far more than just contact information and can record things like Marketing Campaigns, Awards History, Educational Records, Purchase History, Volunteer Participations, Event Information, Service History and much more. Having the entire customer experience in one solution can help your organization achieve results with much more success and efficiency.
Sales and Marketing Automation
A CRM system provides automated workflows that enable your marketing team to spend more time on strategic tasks, such as creating marketing campaigns that resonate, analyzing the data from those campaigns, and testing different approaches based on those analytics. Customer service agents can spend their time working with customers who have more complex questions, problems, or needs. In short, with more efficient customer care processes, companies can build better customer relationships.
Increased Collaboration between Teams
Your CRM system serves as a single source of truth for all transactional, business, and customer data that has been gathered on your customer. Employees across the company can work with the same customer or follow a customer’s progress through marketing, sales, and service. Everyone who has access to your CRM can work together because they have the latest information.
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What is the ROI of a CRM system?
CRM provides a high ROI. Of course, if you are a small business, you can always start with a more basic system with less features, data and processes and expand it as your organization grows. While you may be able to cobble together some version of CRM solution from excel spreadsheets and email, as you grow, you’ll quickly hit the law of diminishing returns.
Leading companies who fully utilize CRM report:
- 52% more delivered proposals, quotes, or RFP responses with 11% more quotes resulting in orders
- 32% higher overall team attainment of sales quota and 24% more individual quota attainment
- 23% higher lead conversion rate