Draw a Business Roadmap to Success with CRM

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What is CRM?

CRM software is designed for customer relationship management which helps us to understand our customers and improves our relations with them. The Customer Relationship Management software manages leads or contacts, helps sales teams, tracks the progress of prospects, and enhances productivity. It doesn’t matter we belong to sales or client-centric organization, the more we know about our prospects and customers, the more opportunities for our business become brighter and it will keep our employees and customers happy.
After knowing what is CRM, let’s move forward towards the evolution of customer relationship management software?

Evolution of CRM

in 80's
The evolution of CRM started with the arrival of database marketing. CRM tool of the ’80s enabled companies to create personalized communications to a group of customers by evaluating database. However, it was challenging as the data was hard to track, unstructured and difficult to update.
in 90's
The beginning of the ’90s transformed database marketing into sales force automation and Siebel launched its first mobile CRM which was the Siebel Sales Handheld.
in 2000
The arrival of 2000 with the dot-com bubble burst and the CRM market curbed down. Big players in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) based industry went through huge losses in revenue. Cloud-based software was hit badly as companies stopped investing in “dot-com” technology.
and Today
At present we are in age on SCRM i.e. Social CRM is equipped with swift internet connectivity and robust cloud infrastructure. The customer relationship management software now is no longer slow or time-consuming systems but offer smooth, streamlined operations that make our jobs easier.

Significance of CRM

  • Understanding only the basic definition what is CRM is not enough to run your business smoothly. You must know that significance as well as challenges while using it. The challenges to identify connect and engage with customers increases as our business grows. In such instances how can we keep our existing customers happy and also the ones who are more to come?
  • How we can facilitate our sales and marketing team to track better prospects and close them into customers in a short span of time?
  • What should we do to cut down the lengthy processes and make them swift to generate higher revenues?
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These are a few questions which most organizations face and they need a solution that can help them to manage all their sales and marketing activities.

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  • CRM is the only answer to all such questions. It is a one-stop solution to all our business requirements as it brings all our business processes on a single platform that eases the work of our team from various departments like sales, marketing, support, and administration.

Which companies should Use CRM?

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Building Images
Building Images

The answer to this question is all types of companies need CRM tool. Small, medium, large and even start-up companies require CRM. The customer relationship management system is an important and crucial part of all types of companies. Any organization that values its customers and wants to apply more streamlined and efficient working practice use CRM.

Any organization that has multiple business processes like sales, marketing, and billing teams, that creates quotes and sends invoices and wants to increase efficiency and customer care use CRM. Even the start-up companies with the ambitions to grow and have a limited client base use CRM. To keep track of every possible customer relationship from the very start it is a must for start-ups to use CRM.

How CRM can enhance
productivity & boost revenue?

Before anything else, a CRM should be easily accessible to its end users like sale and marketing executives, sales managers, and decision-makers. An ideal CRM offers a wide range of functionalities that facilitates sales and marketing teams in various ways. However, the following features are essential to any business that is aiming to organize its systems and enhance its productivity.

Contact Management

One of the most essential features of any CRM is Contact Management; a CRM without Contact Management is of no use. This feature allows sales and marketing executives to create contact lists, store details of qualified leads and customer information in a database.

A CRM system boosts productivity streamline contact lists and contact entries as much as possible. This feature gives a detailed view of new leads and executives have a clear picture of leads they worked on previously and the ones which they need to work.

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Data Capture Automation

As the number of leads grows, it becomes essential to track from where the leads are coming. There are many resources for leads to come like emails, calls, and websites. For example, if any lead is coming through a call then it should be recorded for future reference. In many CRMs, this functionality is missing and we need a different person to copy and paste all such audio files for reference.

Imagine if a single sales executive making more than 50 to 100 calls a day how difficult it would be to keep all records and it will bring errors in manually keeping those call records. A good CRM simplifies this task by automatically logging calls made, emails sent, and posts them on a single platform. This automation of capturing the data saves a lot of time and enhances productivity daily.

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Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is an essential feature of CRM that helps in building highly effective customer interactions to drive more sales and revenue from online campaigns. It enables us to create highly effective email marketing campaigns and build strong customer relationships.

Email marketing is one of the proven marketing techniques and a useful tool to communicate with the prospects that matter to our business. Marketing automation helps us create email campaigns to position our products and service in front of our target audience effectively.

It enables our sales and marketing team to fetch good sales and revenue. It also manages repetitive tasks and reserves our marketing team’s time for streamlining the customer acquisition process.

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Sales Automation

Sales automation is an essential part of our sales that automates and simplifies the entire sales cycle. It helps us to nurture leads more effectively, streamline our sales pipeline and also track our ongoing and future sales opportunities.

In the absence of a sales automation tool, our sales team may miss out on an upcoming sales lead or forget to follow up with a prospect. Sales automation facilitates our sales team in automating the manual repetitive tasks like documentation, writing and sending emails, inventory management, contract management, and pricing.

It helps our sales team in reducing the tedious and repetitive manual tasks and allows them to work on core sales activities.

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Stages of Deal

The deal is nothing but an opportunity on which sales and marketing executives working. There can be various stages of a deal.

A good CRM offers the flexibility of customization so sales and marketing executives can customize their sales and marketing processes accordingly. With such customizations, it becomes easy to move a deal from one stage to the next. These stages depend on interactions made by our team with leads.

From a lead to a customer many stages display a buyer’s journey and as the lead progresses towards being a customer, the stage changes.

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Task Management

Task management is a user-friendly feature that saves a lot of time as a person doesn’t need to toggle between several windows to complete one task.

CRM system with task management feature helps sales and marketing people with various workflows that keep them on track and help them to streamline their work.

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Content Management

Content Management plays a vital role in any CRM tool as it facilitates our team to build seamless communication with prospects and existing customers.

Our team can use the embedded content repository that saves a lot of time that gets wasted in searching for the right content.

CRM systems offer a wide variety of customized email templates which eases the work of our team and they can use them to create effective and personalized messages which generate a positive impression of your business on prospects and existing customers.

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Dynamic Reporting

Dynamic reporting is a powerful business feature that helps us to evaluate complete sales and marketing performance. Dynamic reporting platform displays various reports which facilitate the management in sales reporting, marketing, sales forecasting, sales pipeline evaluation, and many more.

Dynamics CRM reporting is easy and flexible to use so users can get access to the customized report as per business needs. Dynamic reporting helps the team to stay connected with their personalized dashboards and reports. It monitors and gives us a detailed picture of the health of our business.

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Dashboards

As the number of leads increases, it’s difficult to manage them and understand exactly at what stage they are into. Our sales and marketing team needs complete visibility of all leads on a daily basis so they can prioritize leads accordingly.

The dashboard is an essential feature that helps our team to have a glance of all their leads at a single platform; they can get access to all nitty-gritty details of those leads and can gauge that how many deals they have in their pipeline and at what stage, also what they need to do to convert them into a customer.

These Dashboards also help them in analyzing their performance daily which keeps them on track to achieve their desired result and achieve targets in time.

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Mobile Friendly

Mobile-friendly

As most of the businessmen and employees are engaged in meetings and conferences or are always travelling; so mobile integration allows them to access their sales and marketing campaign performance anytime from anywhere. This mobile-friendly integration also helps senior managers to get in touch with their subordinates remotely.

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Benefits of a CRM

In CRM software many applications like Marketing Automation, Sales Automation, and Support Automation are clubbed together to manage leads or contacts and track the progress of prospects. It stores a B2B database and helps the sales and marketing team to identify new leads. It manages tasks for sales and marketing teams by analyzing data and defining useful customer groups.

How CRM Helps?

Primarily the CRM system benefits our sales team, marketing team, customer support executives, and anyone who comes in direct contact with customers. Once customer relationship management software is up and running, employees can follow and track basic information and advanced data of every customer. It acts as a central place to store and manage all information which makes life easier for everyone including our customers…

Primarily the CRM system benefits our sales team, marketing team, customer support executives, and anyone who comes in direct contact with customers. Once CRM software is up and running, employees can follow and track basic information and advanced data of every customer. It acts as a central place to store and manage all information which makes life easier for everyone including our customers, who get better and faster service as we begin to contemplate their requirements more accurately.

It facilitates our team in automating the manual repetitive tasks like documentation, writing and sending emails, inventory management, contract management, and pricing. It helps our team in reducing the tedious and repetitive manual tasks and allows them to work on core sales, marketing, and support activities. It makes our team’s work simple in identifying leads and converting those leads to valuable customers.

Why we need CRM?

The benefits of CRM software are endless; it acts as a master key to unlock our business sales and marketing opportunities. It doesn’t matter we are in a sales or client-centric organization, the more we know about our prospects and customers, the more opportunities for our business become brighter and it will keep our employees and our customers happy. Let’s look into the major benefits of CRM explaining to us that why we need CRM:

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Faster Deal Closures

Sales automation is an integrated feature of a CRM that accelerates our deal closure process. Sending personalized emails and quotes to customers becomes easy with sales automation. Undoubtedly any organization’s primary objective to use sales automation is to manage their contacts and account to enhance sales productivity.

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Intelligent Insights

These intelligent insights help us to make the right decisions at the right time. Through various reports and dashboards, we can analyze the performance of our campaign and can build future sales and marketing strategies. These intelligent insights are in the form of real-time reports which are highly customizable and enable the sales and marketing team to work in sync to achieve the desired result and plan future strategies to generate higher revenues.

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Sales and Marketing work in sync

Sales and marketing teams both have their targets to achieve and when both the teams have accessibility to analyze each other’s performance then it becomes very easy for them to identify the failures and issues which they faced in previous campaigns. It facilitates them to build more powerful strategies to make campaigns successful in result productivity and revenue increases. They can share various metrics and real-time reports with each other and work together to achieve the desired result in the form of higher revenue.

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Lead Identification

CRM accelerates our lead identification process as it helps our sales and marketing team to track more leads through various metrics. We can also analyze the performance of our marketing campaigns which facilitates us to create and present reports in front of decision-makers.

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Prioritize Sales Pipeline

A good and powerful CRM gives a detailed and clear picture of the sales pipeline that facilitates the sales team to know a stage where the client is and how he/ she can be approachable. Apart from giving a pictorial and detailed view of a sales pipeline, it also provides an option to prioritize the leads like whom to call on priority, whom to send follow up email so they don’t miss out on any opportunity.

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Boost productivity

These days CRM systems are also mobile-friendly so it helps those businessmen and employees who are engaged in meetings and conferences or always travelling; it allows them to access their sales and marketing campaign performance anytime from anywhere. It also helps senior managers to get in touch with their subordinates remotely. Even the executives on the field can make the most use of it by feeding the data anytime from anywhere that boosts productivity and also saves time.

Are you ready to buy CRM?

After diving deep into what is CRM and how it boosts sales productivity and drive high sales volume, the next question arises for you: are you ready to buy CRM? Undoubtedly most of the businesses today are using online CRM software that enables their team to manage all the sales and marketing activities effortlessly. It works great when it comes to generate a strong brand presence and enhance lead generation, however, opting for the wrong online CRM tool can drastically damage the overall health of our business. So before purchasing the right CRM software for our business, we must take a few measures which are as follows:

A Checklist before Buying Right CRM Software

Develop an understanding of CRM Concept

Develop a sound understanding of the CRM concept first. It will be of no use if we don’t have a better understanding of the basic functionalities of customer relationship management software. Once we develop a clear understanding of CRM then it will be very easy for us to analyze the CRM before buying and we can also check the knowledge of CRM providers. For example, we can ask the CRM provider regarding the functionalities of CRM and if the provider fails to explain it in simple terms then don’t buy it from them.

Analyze business

We must analyse our business by scanning all the different processes of our business entailing marketing, sales, and support. We shouldn’t make vague assumptions about how these processes work; we must evaluate what is not working and shortlist the pain points which can be worked on after introducing the CRM tool. Doing so helps us to know why exactly we need CRM and how it can work for our business.

Check integrations and accessibility

As we are planning to buy CRM tool so we must check the mobile-friendliness of that CRM. Our motive behind buying an online CRM tool should only be accomplished once we can access all the information on our business processes anytime from anywhere. CRM accessible through mobile is bliss especially for employees who are engaged in travel profiles. It enables them to get connected with their teams remotely and also they can have complete access to all vital information through their mobile phones. Apart from accessibility, we must also ensure that our existing marketing automation services and business directory can be integrated seamlessly with our new CRM; otherwise, it will be a challenging task for our team to import the business directory and the business data that we have purchased from any data provider.

Educate the team

Only buying the best CRM software doesn’t suffice our issues. We should not make any decision just based on CRM features; we must also think that will it be easy for our employees to use it. We must ask our employees about the challenges they face on a daily basis and develop a detailed understanding of how they work and how the CRM application can solve their issues. After that, we should educate our employees by making them aware that CRM is a helpful tool that can make their daily tasks easy and enhance productivity.

Get a free trial

Most of the CRM providers offer free trials; we must take advantage of these offers and try the CRM tool for a few days before purchasing it. Doing so will help us to get hands-on experience on the system and we would be able to analyze the functionalities which we were looking for.

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Conclusion

Hopefully, now we have a better understanding and answer to a question of what is CRM, its benefits, features, and things to keep in mind before choosing any CRM. To get the most out of the CRM, we have to be selective regarding the features that suit our business requirements and can boost our organization’s productivity. Our selection of the appropriate CRM software can either make or break our business. We must think about our organization’s objectives; analyze our long-term and short-term goals when investing in CRM. Choosing the best CRM is not just a monetary investment but it is also a time investment for our sales and marketing team.


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