Leveraging your CRM to the fullest

While a lot of businesses have had CRMs for a while now, there are always new businesses that could benefit from a CRM system. Also, CRMs are always changing and evolving, so even businesses that have had them for a while could learn about some new features or benefits that they didn’t know about before.

As with every evolving field, there is a great variety in the industry, with various companies that attempt to streamline and custom-tailor CRM systems to different industries. This can create confusion for many new businesses trying to select the right system for their company.

In this article, we will go over the main advantages of CRMs to try to clarify what exactly is required from the system – so that you can leverage this fundamental tech to its full potential.

Without further ado, let’s dive into our top CRM benefits for any business!

Customer Retention

First and foremost – few things have as significant a negative effect on a business as customer churn. High churn disrupts cash flow and reduces revenue; therefore, it is vital to maximize the retention of our customers.

CRMs allow businesses to capture and log all customer interactions, thus enabling follow-ups, behavioural tracking, automation, and analysis of all touchpoints with clients. This directly affects the ability of a business to optimize itself to re-occurring business – encouraging engaged clients with further engagement and addressing problems quickly and efficiently, and driving customer satisfaction.  The direct result of that is an increase in the likelihood that they choose to invest back into your business.

Increase in Sales

Next up is another understandable ripple effect of the increased control of the sales pipeline. CRMs streamline the sales pipeline allowing sales reps to do their job more efficiently and spend more time doing what matters most – closing deals.

Sales reps working without CRMs need to keep track of many moving parts that make their daily interactions with numerous clients. This creates a reality that distracts them from actually dealing with clients since there are so many actions required of them surrounding the sales process.

CRMs allow for automation to take the burden of mundane tasks off of the sales rep, and enable him to focus on the task at hand.

Marketing Optimization

Marketing, like most things in business nowadays is based on data – CRMs provide marketers with direct access to the relevant data that is required for effective customer segmentation and understanding to better review the KPIs that the marketing team is working towards through the analysis of the actual customers that made it through the pipeline.

Moreover, the automation that is such an integral part of many CRMs today extends in some cases into the marketing team’ allowing them to run campaigns directly through the CRM or augment existing automation software with the CRM level to further streamline the integration with the sales team.

Automation

One of the most advantageous parts of CRMs is the automation it allows across the board. Most CRMs today incorporate automation into most levels of the system – automated ticketing, automated mailing and customer support, automated reports, etc are industry standards today.

We will dig into specific CRM areas that allow for dramatic improvements by utilizing automation.

Organizational Communications

As your business scales and grows, the number of employees will increase and the internal communication becomes complicated to manage. CRMs are used to share customer information, even remotely, thus increasing teamwork within the company.

This allows for strategic cooperation which in effect allows for better organizational efficiency because different departments can use the fruits of other departments’ labor – driving business profitability and efficiency.

Data

The modern world, with the major advancement in big data analysis, enables businesses to utilize data to gain high-quality insights into their business and industry. There seems to be a major caveat that is often overlooked and that is how a business acquires, logs, and stores the relevant data to then utilize using whichever software it wishes.

This integral part of the puzzle is often addressed with the use of CRMs since they are a focal point of most of the company’s data and are oftentimes compatible with various tools that enable the addition of whatever missing data needed to complete the picture for your specific company. Thus, creating a database from which you can extract meaningful insights into your customer behavior, marketing effectiveness, and strategic positioning of your business.

Sales Analysis, Forecast + Customer Segmentation

Within the sales world, the ability to predict the performance of a company’s sales team can be crucial to the general understanding of the welfare of the company. Cashflow and market position for instance are two major factors that influence decision-makers within a company and that are directly derived from a healthy sales forecast.

This ability to analyze the customer data, evaluate the sales team performance and give valuable insights for future improvement, affects not only the sales team but also the accuracy of the sales forecast and overall quality of the leadership decision making process.

Take away

As I am sure you understand by now, a company’s CRM is a fundamental, powerful tool that can affect many different aspects of a company. There are many benefits to implementing such a system, yet each company is unique in its needs and therefore considering the different unique advantages of each CRM is vital to the effectiveness you hope to create in the implementation of the system.

Every business has to take into consideration the variations that will help create a complete view and streamline operation for its unique value proposition and situation.

I hope this has helped you gain some understanding of the advantages that such a system could potentially have for your company.