Eighty percent of business leaders from a recent study reported using CRM systems as a single source of truth for their customers. It’s clear the role of CRM has evolved beyond a contact management tool. Modern CRM systems enable leaders to effectively unite teams in a shared view of data — and more importantly, manage customer relationships with ease.
The businesses need sales and to boost sales, an effective environment to automate, engage, and create a platform to connect is needed. Now, if you’re looking to achieve more than retaining productivity, but taking it to the next level together with your business, then CRM has some major benefits you shouldn’t ignore.
What is CRM?
So, what is a CRM anyway? A customer relationship management software (CRM) acts as a tool for maintaining consumer records. It is a platform where businesses can store all information related to present customers and potential clients. This information contains consumer name, contact details, address, company, purchase history, and so on.
28% of millennials believe that CRM applications are extremely critical to their success compared to 18% of Generation X and 9% of Baby boomers. Businesses often use various free and open source CRM solutions available in the market to achieve their growth targets.
There are a number of different components of CRM that are essential to run a business towards success. Every component is unique in itself and plays a major undeniable role in the process:
- Marketing automation
- Sales forecasting
- Geolocation technology, or location-based services
- Lead management
- Dashboard-based analytics
- Workflow automation
- Human resources management
- External integration with other software
Workflow automation
CRM systems help businesses optimize processes by streamlining mundane workloads, enabling employees to focus on creative and more high-level tasks. For instance, for each contact or lead, it can tell you exactly where they are in the sales funnel and even automatically create future tasks based on this information.
CRM can also help to automate your marketing efforts. It can automatically execute huge email or social campaigns. All you need to do is provide content, set triggers that are supposed to provoke the action and determine the initial parameters for segmenting the audience. This can save an enormous amount of time, as well as the money you would’ve otherwise spent on manual workforce. And also keeps you away from the dangers of human error.
Customer data consolidation and integration
Another huge advantage offered by CRM systems is gathering scattered data collected across multiple channels. A reliable CRM software is not only able to collect this huge amount of info, but will also process it and enable you to make an actual sense of it. Some of them can be integrated not just to your website and social networks, but virtually any application you wish, thanks to the use of API.
These integrated data also include any communication you’ve had with your customers. Having all this info about your customers and prospects will help you do a better job at segmenting them and personalizing their experience. All this further enables you to build more sustainable relationships with your customers.
Moreover, CRM ensures easy access to data from wherever you need it, whenever you need it. As much as 74% of CRM users claim that they have improved access to customer data thanks to the software. And having the right data about your customers and your target groups is absolutely crucial for any serious sales or marketing effort nowadays.
Real-time insights
One great thing about CRM is not only that you have access to all the necessary data, but you also have it in real-time. As soon as the user makes a purchase or sends you a message or signs up, you’ll be informed about their progress in the customer journey. This enables you to approach them or take any other appropriate action immediately. You can even set the system to take this action automatically.
It’s also extremely important that you can measure the success of your sales or marketing efforts in real-time. If things are going bad, it’s crucial that you have feedback that can help you identify the exact problem. Any business that’s expecting growth needs to be able to adapt and modify their strategies in real-time, as soon as any kind of trouble occurs.
It helps you manage internal interactions
Last but definitely not least, you can use your CRM to track the performance of every member of your team, also in real-time. Automation across sales, service, and marketing will free your employees so they can spend more time talking to prospective customers and strengthening relationships with existing ones, moving the needle for your business.
This way CRM provides you with some objective criteria for rating your employees’ efforts and achievements. You can even get daily, weekly or monthly condensed reports highlighting the most important findings. A well-focused CRM strategy will build stronger foundations for better communication within the internal team. Sharing critical customer insights and information among departments will help organizations work as a team and optimize the customer experience.
Wrapping up
By centralizing your database, the workforce can concentrate on high-value tasks that will help businesses increase productivity with accelerated business growth. With automated workflow and easy access to all important data, your sales team will have an easier job selling stuff, and your marketing team will be able to create and execute narrowly-targeted campaigns.
