A CRM, or customer relationship management, can be made up of a lot of different platforms, software, and business strategies. According to Forbes, a CRM is “is all of the activities, strategies and technologies that companies use to manage their interactions with their current and potential customers”. A CRM “toolkit” is made up of many facets, including websites, social media, telephone calls, chat, mail, email and various marketing materials, and modern platforms such as HubSpot like to combine all of these services into one, easy to use service.
By intelligently storing and managing your customers' data, a CRM system increases lead volume, helping your marketing team find new customers faster. It supports your sales teams in closing more deals faster. It also enhances customer service. We are going to dive into a few of the reasons why a CRM is essential for a modern business to utilize, starting with the most obvious one, better customer relations.
While “customer relations” is in the name, it's not always immediately obvious how a CRM really helps with the customer experience. CRM tools help businesses to better learn about their customer bases, including who they are and why they are interested in purchasing your products. This allows businesses to better anticipate their customers' needs and, as a result, fulfill them. Effectively using a CRM platform also provides a strategic advantage. Well organized and prioritized customer data helps companies select the correct recipients for new promotional initiatives, including newsletters, email blasts, and early access to new products. Finally, CRM software allows businesses to optimize their customer interactions. By simplifying and streamlining many of the more complex customer interaction processes, you free up more resources for your employees to focus on more thorough interactions with potential clients and leads, increasing customer satisfaction.
When a business becomes large enough to establish separate departments, proper coordination between dynamic teams often becomes difficult. CRM software is designed to improve collaboration throughout the entire internal process. This efficient combining of multiple areas within a business is known as Revops or revenue operations. 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.
A good 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. By effectively utilizing these tools affording by a CRM platform, you will score more leads, improve closure rates, and increase your revenue.
One of the new trends in CRM technology is the adaption and usage of AI to bolster their already powerful tools. These powerful additions allow even more optimization to your business strategies, such as:
Now all that's left is to choose what platform works best for your business. This isn’t a one size fits all situation, and each platform has its own specific tools to help manage your customer base and maximize on lead generation. Carefully weigh all the different price points and feature sets to determine which platform works best.
Powerful marketing and sales tools, better collaboration and communication between departments, and an enhanced customer experience coming together in one powerful package makes it easy to see why utilizing a CRM in your business’ digital strategy is essential. Whether you choose to utilize some included tools, or all of them, we are confident that your business will see improvements across all departments, and generate more leads as a result.
If you liked this blog and want to learn even more about CRM’s or Digital Transformation, check out some of our other blogs! We cover a wide array of topics in Technology across multiple industries. If you have any questions or are interested in our very own CRM integrations services, we would love to chat with you.