CRM, or customer relationship management, is the backbone of all sales strategies. It regulates and nurtures the relationship between you and your customers all in one place.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that 90% of companies with ten or more employees use CRM solutions.
After the arduous work of generating leads and having a list of potential customers to nurture through the customer’s journey, it’s the CRM service that will play a key role. This software keeps the sales reps on top of things by organizing all lead, prospect, and customer information. Even for one qualified lead, there’s too much information for your sales rep to track over several months.
If you don’t automate your process through a CRM solution, then you can easily miss opportunities and cannot deliver the best service for your customers.
In short, engagement with customers and how best to achieve that is why companies built CRMs. Its goal is twofold: to improve customer service and increase sales.
Customer Relationship Management’s Business Impact
Business Impact, or BI, is the measurement of what happens when your company completes an action. You then compared it to a time when your company does not take the action. You can measure this in several ways, but more often than not it’s through revenue or customer experience.
Here is a brief list of how CRMs can improve your company:
- Customer service: According to a study in 2018, 85% of CRM operators see improved customer service as one of the biggest benefits of CRM. It almost seems too obvious to say that a satisfied customer is good for business. But it’s easier said than done. Getting to that satisfaction is exactly where CRM excels.
- Increased Sales: The logical extension of more satisfied customers is more sales. But there’s more. CRM also ensures that customers receive more accurate information on what they need and the best possible product or service you offer. For example, an automotive industry CRM can streamline customer interactions, helping dealerships deliver tailored solutions and boost both the quantity and quality of sales.
- Better Analytics: Organizing the customer’s data in one place is a central feature of CRM tools. It also allows marketers and sales managers the ability to contribute to creating a more accurate set of analytics.
Business Impact Analysis
Before moving to the several types of CRMs, it’s important to get a better understanding of Business Impact Analysis, or BIA.
BIA identifies how a business disruption, in this case the introduction of CRM, will affect your company. The BIA report is a critical business measure to safeguard against potential disasters. Often these reports will come with disaster recovery analyses.
A BIA will look at resources and risks using all available information. If they find an unavoidable disruption, then you should develop a business continuity plan to provide a map of recovery.
After introducing this new plan, you will have a set time for recovery, known as recovery time objectives, in which to restore normal business functions. There should be certain data points, recovery point objectives, reached that will prevent your company from losing important data.
How is this relevant for CRM?
If you introducing CRM solutions, it can be a business disruption. That’s why you need to analyze software before and after implementation. That will require planning, team meetings, independent research, and everything else that a BIA report can oversee.
Let’s see how CRMs can affect your business according to its various kinds.
Types of CRM
When we’re talking about CRM tools, we’re mostly talking about it in sales automation.
CRMs, at their best, fluidly regulate the relationship between customer and sales reps. They automate a lot of work because their relationship will take place over a lengthy period with other relationships happening in between. Knowing what content to share and when is therefore extremely difficult without CRM software.
The most popular and powerful CRM platform aids the sales funnel, which is the pathway leads take to become customers. The first step will be gathering leads and their data. Some CRMs even use advanced, AI-powered tools to do this work in seconds.
The next step is to determine the type of qualified lead you have and gradually nudge them toward certain products or services. Again, if you keep track of all that content and email marketing, you can complicate your process and harm relationships.
And last, after you’ve successfully converted a customer, you have valuable data on how they interacted with your company, which is stored in the CRM system.
Another important aspect of CRMs is communication, both internal and external. CRM platforms offer access to more than just the sales rep, so marketers and managers can check out the data and be able to assist.
And externally, services like chatbots, for instance, are an excellent example of companies being able to provide automated, personalized communication to potential customers.
Business Impact by Department
To further break down CRMs, we’ll see how they specifically affect each department.
Sales
Sales reps are the important vectors connecting your company to its customers. They provide excellent customer service and experience, manage customer interactions, and of course, make sales.
Aiding the sales team is one of the most crucial functions of CRM solutions. Through contact management, you can automatically upload contact information gathered through landing pages and other lead generation techniques. From there, sales reps can contact leads and prospects.
CRM technology allows sales reps to track customer interactions across your site, social media, and specific items they’re interested in. Once you have more of this customer data, you can better market the content they’ll find interesting enough to become a paying customer.
You can craft customer experiences carefully. The goal is to increase sales purely through customer interaction, which becomes much easier when using an all-in-one platform to guide you through the process.
And ideally, your customer retention rate will increase the more they’re individually catered to.
Marketing
Digital marketing has benefited a lot from the adoption of CRMs.
Gone are the days when you send out the same or slightly similar emails to the same leads and customers over a period of weeks or months. Email marketing stands to gain the most from CRM systems that set up automated email marketing campaigns.
That means setting up an automated chain of emails to respond in real time. Then based on how the leads interact, will send another set of emails.
For instance, if someone provides their name and email address on a product landing page, an email offering more information on that product or more like it will soon land in their inbox.
Another instance is when customers are interested in returning. Already having their previous data on interactions will make a new email marketing campaign even easier to align them with.
Management
Sales managers can ease much of their tedious workload by using CRM solutions.
For example, lead scoring uses lead data to rate them, which gives the managers an easier time in assigning leads to sales reps.
Going back to Business Impact Analysis, managers can develop strategies to assign risk assessments to CRM solutions. When they write up BIA reports, the data from the CRM will be essential.
The goal being to better understand the resource requirements necessary to increase sales in the future.
And finally, project management is another one of the principal benefactors from CRM tools. Projects will have better insights and visual representations, depending on the type of CRM you use. Some come with highly attractive graphics and interfaces that transmit information to the team in a form that equips them to handle tasks better.
Steps for Future Growth
If you’ve filled out your BIA reports and conducted trial-and-error analysis using various platforms and services, then you will have greater insight into the long-term growth of your company.
To summarize, CRM solutions are becoming wildly more popular each year. They are essential in the digital world to regulate the relationship between you and your customers. The best tools should make that interaction appear seamless.
Business Impact is an important measure to determine the steps your company can and should take.
If you’ve done your homework, then you will have a better idea of which type of CRM software you need most. Looking for ones with AI-powered lead generation and scoring? Or maybe you’re looking for an all-in-one communication network? You will find the exact fit for you because of all the options now available.
And don’t forget that CRM tools help your company at every level. From the sales rep’s ability to increase sales, to the marketer’s capacity to craft the best content, and to the manager’s skill in conducting a company into an expert symphony.
Find out for yourself how CRMs can be important for your business. Want more content like this article? Reach out to us via marketing@dyl.com
