User Review
( votes)As an organization, there are many aspects you must be aware of. Selling quality products, providing a wide range of services with a strong marketing campaign- all are important. But, a pivotal factor for small and medium-scale businesses is their ability to build long-lasting connections with their customers.
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution is aimed at creating and maintaining a link with your clients. Smaller businesses have a small customer base. This gives them the advantage of creating personalized communication channels with each of their users.
CRM software has been around for years, helping businesses keep track of their interactions with clients and offering tips on improving contact. But software can’t help your business unless it’s used properly. Here we look at ways in which it can help your business.
Influx of CRMs
Today’s market is teeming with CRMs. This gives the user lots of options to choose from. But it also creates a noisy environment with many sub-par applications. Acquiring and integrating your business with a CRM and then finding out that it doesn’t have what you need, results in a wastage of time and money. It is also impossible to demo all the tools. Certain aspects determine its validity.
Reduction of data entry
If the sales reps make any errors during data entry in a hurry, it leads to incomplete records. You can’t always blame them. Toggling between several data sheets and sources, a human error is bound to happen.
With a CRM system, you can set up lead capture forms, feedback forms, and set up mandatory fields to ensure complete data capture. This takes the data entry effort away from Sales reps and saves a lot of time.In case manual data entry (for leads captured through networking events, for example) is needed, the system can ensure details are not missed out.
Accurate forecast
For an SMB it becomes easier to capture the customer’s journey from start (lead gen) to end (first sale) and beyond. Even the social media sentiment of the customer about your brand or other brands can be captured, giving you a highly magnified look into your customers’ lives.
You can get a clear understandingof how the customer interacted with your brand and confidently conclude what works for them and what doesn’t. Over time, you begin to find patterns and insights into the purchase process, thereby strengthening your Sales strategy.
With a CRM you can have a simplified and more accurate view of the leads pipeline and an enhanced sales strategy and the forecasting becomes less guesswork and more reliable with data-based predictions.
Managing customers
Customer management is the heart of CRM. The application must be able to collect, store, analyze, and display customer details. Many applications also come with personalized marketing features. CRM collects data from your phone calls, website, email, and chat to store it in a singular, accessible location. No more tracking of the conversation across multiple channels. No more time wasted in copying and pasting the text to collate the data. More than anything, using a CRM ensures that your sales or customer service agents don’t miss any important message in the flood of everyday conversations.
Contract Management
A business grows not only by bringing in new customers but also by retaining existing customers. Once you have a customer, you have to convert it into a long-term contract. A contract management application within your CRM allows you to create, evaluate, and optimize the deals you make with your customers. Your contracts can be easily logged and viewed using the tool. Custom prepared contract layouts can be designed to best fit your business and contract types.
Key Integrations
The more communication channels you have, the more data will be fed into your CRM system. While this may be difficult to manually analyze, CRMs provide data analysis tools to quickly and automatically crunch the numbers. It is important, therefore, to increase the number of data collection points in your CRM. Including various social platforms into your roster will boost your CRMs efficiency.
Sales Planning
It is essential to create a comprehensive strategy for an SMB marketing technique. Without it, your marketing team would be uncoordinated and inefficient. Accommodating customer demands into your planning are key to a winning sales strategy. A CRM has a unique quota management feature that allows you to assign sales targets for an individual or team and manage these quotas. Optimizing the sales pipeline with CRM becomes convenient for your organization.
Lead Management
While existing customers are vital for your firm’s upkeep, catering to new consumers is essential to upscaling your business. A lead is a potential customer who is yet to purchase your product but is interested in your business. A lead may be generated from any communication channel- an inquiry from the user or outreach from your sales team. Converting your leads into valued customers can increase business. A CRM can ensure a zero-leakage policy in an SMB.
To sum up
Customer Relationship Management tools are imperative to all companies, whether they are in the Fortune 500 or are garage firms. But they have widely different uses for such an application. So, find the CRM with which you can raise your revenue substantially.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM helps small and mid-market companies facilitate business relationships with customers, prospects, and team members. It includes a collection of cloud apps to help manage a variety of business processes, from sales to operations to accounting. It gives employees the practical tools they need to be more productive, improve customer relationships, and win more business.
Do you have questions about Microsoft Dynamics CRM? Connect with us.
We have tried to understand how CRM can be more than just a tool to help sales rep. How it can go beyond optimizing the pipeline and work for a holistic growth of a company. Our whitepaper 15 CRM challenges discusses it and a lot more.
