How To Use CRM To Increase Sales

hough it’s called Customer Relationship Management, it can be useful beyond just handling relations. CRM helps you handle business processes easily, but you shouldn’t just view it as a tool to improve customer service and make things easier for everyone. When employed effectively, CRM should be seen as an important means to the benefits of improving efficiency, boosting sales and turning prospects into customers. It has a proven track record of increasing sales, productivity and forecast accuracy. This guide will show you how to use CRM to increase sales easily and effectively.

1. Share Information Across Your Sales Team

If your business processes aren’t co-ordinated, it can cause a lot of unnecessary hassle and time-wasting. Not only does having everyone on the same page keeps everyone informed with up-to -date information, but it will reduce the risk of senseless mistakes that can make your business seem unprofessional. For example, if a lead is contacted twice by the same company it can make your organisation seem, well, disorganised. A CRM system can store all of the relevant information and share it across your team, so everyone knows about the progress of sales, and no unnecessary work is expended.

2. Track Sales

You need to be constantly monitoring your sales cycle if you wish to close sales and maintain relationships. Using CRM to keep an eye on your sales cycle can help you to fix any flaws in your methods in order to improve your sales. Each stage of the process can be supervised by CRM, which can tell you what is working, what isn’t and what needs to be done.

3. Learn About Your Customers

CRM can help your sales team garner a surprising amount of data from research on their behaviour such as social media activity, coupled with effective and reliable data entry. This information can boost sales by proposing custom offers to clients based on what you know about them.

You can also discover which customer segments are valuable to you. Naturally there will be certain groups in your customer base that are willing to spend more on your product or service, or consume fewer resources, and are therefore more valuable to your business than others. You can increase sales significantly by targeting these segments.

4. Reporting

Being able to easily generate reports can help your business get more out of the data you have collected, which can be used to make decisions and implement strategies. CRM provides dashboards and automation features which removes any need to manually collect information for reports. Unlike manual reporting, CRM displays information on demand and in real time.

5. Alerts

Keeping on top of all of your business processes is tricky without CRM software. A CRM can contain an alert function that notifies your staff of events or actions that need to or are about to occur. If an order hasn’t shipped or a lead is at a loose end, then a CRM solution can inform your team.

6. Email Marketing

You can get customers to purchase your products or services more often by presenting offers and promotions through email marketing. Even if your client isn’t interested in what is being offered, offers and promotions get people to think about your company, which drives up sales.

7. Mobile Access

CRM apps allow for mobile access, which is a huge benefit that allows your team to meet sales standards. Mobile devices facilitate remote access, which can more easily suit your work processes without affecting productivity.

8. Task Management

Task management is essential to handle your most vital responsibilities. Being able to manage customer accounts efficiently can make directing upsells and cross-sells to them easier and can generate more business for you. A CRM system can automatically prioritise and notify you of any actions that need to be taken on immediately, so that the relationship and dialogue you have with your customers can be effectively maintained and developed.

9. Capturing Leads

Capturing leads is a very simple and direct way of boosting sales. CRM can monitor form fills, which allows your team to be notified of any interested in a particular landing page on your website. This gives you the ability to follow up this interest with a phone call. You can customise your CRM software so you can be notified as to when someone has clicked onto your site, providing as much information as possible for your pitch to them.

10. Customer Service

CRM benefits your customers as well as your company. It provides a system that allows your team to communicate with customers, using data collected by the software to improve the solutions offered for their problems. Integrating a web portal with your CRM software lets customers easily access their online order status, service ticket information and even the online knowledge base.