Have you ever wondered why competition is doing so well and why clients love that they remain loyal and maintain long-term patronage? The short answer is that they utilize effective CRM software. Are you wondering what CRM is? Let’s find out.
What is CRM Software?
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It is a technology used to learn, manage and improve a company’s relationship with its customers at the different stages of their buyer’s journey and with the teams they interact. CRM provides an avenue that helps you as a business learn more about your existing and potential customers.
CRM software is a system designed to collect, record and manage data collected from interactions with customers at various stages of a buyer’s journey. It avails a consolidated visual form of the consumers’ database to your company’s teams. Thus, everyone can easily interpret and update the data to influence better decision-making.
How CRM Software Works
CRM software helps your company learn about its customers when they have problems that your products or services can solve. A buyer’s journey starts when they make the first contact with your business.
It could be by reading your web content, filling out a form, or signing up for a newsletter or live chat; this is when they enter your CRM system. Now, you have gotten the first information about who they are. You have to start the ‘engage‘ phase in your marketing strategy.
Subsequent interactions from the sales, marketing, and customer service with that customer lead to the more acquired information. You will know the problems they use or intend to use your products to solve. Then, you will be able to devise how to market your products to them and which outreach emails or sales copies to send to them.
As time passes, you will get more prospects who may or may not have similar patterns with your recognized buyers. In the case of the latter, you will need to create a new persona for those buyers. With CRM software, you can automate how these buyers are assigned based on signals you have defined in the system.
For example, we can say Mr. A is a “quick buyer” if he buys within a week of interacting with you. And Mr. B is a “slow buyer” if he only transacts after one week. Thus, we can automate the system to study the activities of both subjects and assign new customers to either Mr. A or B personas.
As a result, you can automate follow-up emails and sales copies to each customer based on their information.
How CRM Software can Help Your Company Grow
Are you still using spreadsheets and postponing updating your customers’ data because your recent findings are voluminous? Or have you been spending much money hiring data enterers every time you acquired new market data? Well, that needs to stop now, my friend!
CRM software is the powerful weapon your company is missing. Find out how you can use CRM to cut costs and increase the efficiency of your business strategy by building better relationships with your customer.
Improved Customer Service
Believe it or not! Customer service is the most crucial department in your organization. They are the direct link between your company and clients, and they determine clients’ perceptions of your brand. According to a survey by Truelist, 80% of customers will pay better if they enjoy good customer service.
CRM helps you to understand your customers better on a personal level. Because your system compiles information about each client (definitely not creepy!), the service department can access their previous concerns in a comprehensive, visual representation way. Thus, they will know the best way to answer clients’ questions personally and based on their assumed personas; this leads to increased customer satisfaction and ascertained long-term relationships.
Increased Sales
CRM software can increase sales in recurring purchases or referrals and effective marketing. Before you get lost, remember our last point? Yes, that’s how! Excellent customer service leads to regular purchases from previous clients. And, as I said in a recent post, a happy customer is your most excellent promoter! These clients will gladly refer your products or services to more people, which drives more sales for your company. At no extra cost!
Additionally, CRM software gives you aggregate information about your campaigns, what is working and not, and what to do differently. Therefore, you can use this information to automate your sales copies and marketing emails in a personalized form.
You are advertising Market-specific products or services to only those who have shown interest in them instead of generic contacts. This leads to higher conversion and better sales. You will know not to market an AI writing tool to me if you have already learned that I am pro-traditional writing or that it will be unwitty! Haha!
It Reduces Unnecessary Costs
Most CRMs lets team members in sales, marketing, and customer service immediately update information on the go for the whole organization to use. Functions like this prevent the data from getting lost or misrecorded, leading to misleading markets and wasted investments. Without a CRM, notes got from expensive surveys could get lost.
Increases Overall Performance of Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service
CRM allows your business’s sales, Marketing, Customer Service, and other teams to record customer information in a unified system. Thus, each group learns about a client from other teams’ findings, uses the information, and updates them if applicable. This behavior allows each team to inform its strategy based on available data.
Is Salesforce a CRM?
Salesforce is a leading cloud-based technology that provides a competitive and feature-rich platform that allows companies to build CRM software and web applications that fit their business model.
With Salesforce, you can integrate 100+ third-party apps like Google Cloud, Whatsapp, Dropbox, Einstein AI, etc., making your CRM system more productive. That said, yes, Salesforce is a CRM system, but it is also a lot more. Salesforce is an integrated, all-in-one solution to help skyrocket your sales and marketing efforts with better customer service, integration, and an easy-to-understand user interface.
