For any business the most precious assets are the customers i.e. the people who purchase the goods and services. Hence, maintaining a healthy relationship with the customers is of utmost importance. To serve this purpose a CRM plays a crucial role and this software specializes in managing customer relationships efficiently.
Before the advent of CRM software the details about the customers were largely stored in the brains of your team members, in the computers of your sales representatives, heap of invoices on your accountant’s desk.
A good CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system does the following things for your company:
Now let’s see how you can grow your business with a CRM!
You are spending tons of money on various media (email, social media, advertisements on newspapers and television etc) to get leads. Now what? You are getting enquiries in your inbox. But those enquiries are getting buried in your inbox. As a result, you are unable to get back to them promptly and your lead can go to another service provider and you will lose an opportunity of sales. Sounds scary?
Well, don’t worry! A CRM lets you see where your contacts and leads are on their sales journey with you. Accordingly, you can make your business decisions. Such a clear visibility of your business pipeline not only helps you in closing more sales but shortening the sales cycle also. Shortening sales cycle will also let you go for up-selling and cross-selling.
Knowing your customers and potential customers better, creates opportunities to reach out to them and hold meaningful conversation with them. You can contact your prospects through various platforms of communication like different online channels- website, social media and so on. But without a proper software that keeps tracks and monitors all your lead and customer data as well as your company’s interactions and conversations with them, your company’s customer management can go down drastically. Poor customer management has a negative impact on your business’s growth and development.
So, CRM solutions aim at removing the obstructions that your customer facing teams and sales representatives go through.
For example, your customer service team gets numerous calls everyday from the customers regarding various issues. Without a CRM, finding customer information can be time consuming and tedious. But if you have a CRM system then the needed customer information will show you the customer’s transaction history, previous conversations with your company, email exchanges and enable your team to hold an intelligent conversation with the customer. By just a simple glance at customers’ data you can not only provide the right kind of support but also recommend them additional services and products that make sense.
The term workflow means series of steps required for any process in your business to be completed. An advanced CRM software like Zoho can both partially and fully automate workflows in CRM according to your needs.
Example, when a lead enters your CRM system, you might want to check whether you had any previous communication with this person. The CRM can automatically check this. After this work is done then the sales representative’s responsibility is to get in touch with the prospect and trying to find out if the prospect’s interests match with your products/services. Depending on their interest you might want to set up workflows that follow-up with the prospect automatically, send them or request for relevant information. Automating all these workflows can prove to be significantly time saving.
Biggest advantage of having a CRM is its automation function. Mundane tasks like sending welcome emails, thank you emails, sending templated emails for delivering content to the right person in the right time are time consuming and enervating.
Automation frees you from repetitive tasks and lets you focus on growing your business. Automation lets you pick up on your contacts where you left off and efficiently manage relationships with your customers as well as your leads.
Manually entering lead information into your system can be tedious. You can miss out on the small details of your leads and the gathered information can be distorted, corrupted and full of errors. So, automation of lead management and data entry is a must.
CRM lets you generate different reports on your business. This means the ability to measure the health of your company at any given point of time. Using your data, you can create customizable report on any business metric like performance of your sales representatives, number of sales closed in a month, money invested on marketing campaigns and return on investment.
After generating reports, you can share and discuss your reports with your sales and marketing teams to enhance growth.
A CRM is needed for your business growth for multiple reasons. This is an all rounder software that helps in centralizing and managing all your customer data, coordination among all your departments and teams, close deals faster, solve customer issues better, convert maximum leads to profitable customers.
So, it is high time you must consider using a CRM for your business. To know more get in touch with our experts now.