The Opportunities and Advantages of a CRM
A CRM system contains plenty of information about the company's clients. You can check customers' profiles and the history of their interactions with your firm. You can analyze whether and how you meet their demands and what you can do to do it better next time. This will increase the loyalty of your audience and boost your revenue.
In a CRM, business owners and managers can discover exhaustive data about sales conversions, proposals, meetings and so on. Plus, there will be guidelines on how to deal with direct interactions. Managers can handily systemize and track all the appropriate facts and statistics.
A CRM allows the firm to automate diverse aspects of sales, making them more precise, fast and efficient.
These are the opportunities of the system that most of its users are very well familiar with. Yet if you give just a little twist to them, you can employ a CRM in many other ways.
Manage Your Sales
Typically, commercial managers gain the most from a CRM. It enables them to track the activity of each team member, make forecasts and compile regular reports. But in many organizations today, the duties of a commercial manager might be distributed among several staff members. To fulfill them, they rely on a CRM.
Sales Prospecting
To sell your goods or services successfully, you need only quality leads. To obtain them, you should build a powerful prospecting strategy, based on numbers and statistics.
The procedure of creating the strategy starts with the automation of the principal phases of the sales process. Thanks to the CRM, managers import contact details in bulk. If compared to manual data input, this saves them the considerable effort. They aim to get hold of the prospects' data, structure it and pass it over to sales and marketing specialists.
To handle large amounts of data, modern CRM systems either integrate with third-party prospecting instruments or offer their users embedded prospecting features (such as converting email addresses into contacts).
Sales Outreach
Once you compile a list of qualified leads, you should sift and refine them so that they accurately define your target audience. Then, integrate a marketing automation instrument with your CRM to maximize the efficiency of your outreach efforts.
A CRM enables you to control sales outreach campaigns right from its interface. All your customer profiles and analytics will be centralized. Your perception of your campaign strategy will become more precise.
Tracking
Managers can configure the CRM so that it tracks leads. Ideally, they should set up an order of preprogrammed actions. Thanks to such an approach, professionals can conveniently measure the progress of their leads. The visual representation of crucial data in the CRM helps managers to make better decisions. Once a lead reaches a specific phase, it automatically triggers tasks that push it further forward. At any phase of the process, salespeople can monitor the state of the lead very precisely and modify their actions correspondingly.
Employ the CRM for Strategic Marketing
Marketing your goods or services directly to your leads or people who might be potentially interested in them is not the only way to sell them. A strategic approach suggests that you should involve the opinion-makers of your industry and influencers from social networks. Also, you should provide backlinks to your site.
You should realize the unique competitive edge of your product and analyze how your prospective clients can benefit from it. The primary goal is to expand your presence and boost your brand awareness so that it is not limited only to your own site, app and social media accounts.
Backlinks
Some SEO specialists might claim that backlinks today are not as efficient as they used to be. In practice, it turns out to be untrue. Websites that have lots of relevant backlinks from resources with high domain authority benefit from higher positions in Google search results.
It takes quite a lot of time and effort to set up backlinks if you try to interact with each resource individually via email. To facilitate the process, do the following in your CRM:
- Define the leads.
- Make a pipeline.
- Describe what your potential partner needs to do.
Such an approach resembles cold emailing but is less time-consuming. The CRM saves the history of your link-building attempts. You will be unlikely to send the offer to the same recipient twice, so the risk of spamming will be reduced to a minimum. You can reread all the conversations at any moment and then estimate the progress of each deal.
Thanks to the CRM, several specialists can handle the task of setting up backlinks simultaneously. The system can share its data among multiple professionals. The information is very well structured so that people would never mix up their responsibilities with someone else's.
Guest Posting
Consumers of your goods or services should value expert opinion highly. To share authoritative insights with them, you do not need to hire an opinion leader full-time. Instead, invite them to share a guest post in your blog or social media account. Alternatively, you can step into the expert's shoes yourself and arrange a guest post on a platform that your potential customers trust. You will not only get the backlink but also raise your status and reach a new audience.
The way a CRM can help you here is very similar to the above-described process of negotiating the links. Thanks to automation, your team will be unlikely to make mistakes typical of the manual approach. Your productivity will grow thanks to a unified shareable data source.
Public Relations
Before employing a CRM in your public relations, you should manually compile a list of media and journalists to collaborate with. Once you carry out a cold outreach and detect which ones are ready to work with you, streamline the procedure in the CRM.
The system enables you to:
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Manage extensive contact lists
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Create detailed profiles of your contacts
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Schedule follow-ups
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Track interactions
Good personal relations are an essential prerequisite for efficient PR. Before contacting a journalist, check their profile in the CRM and refresh your knowledge. What is this person most interested in? Which channel of communication do they prefer? Are they looking for hot news or analytical articles? Journalists appreciate a personalized approach and the CRM will help you to establish a better rapport with them.
Partnerships
Any potential partnership typically involves multiple and rather complicated interactions. You would need to meet people in person, call them by phone, send them emails and text them in messengers. The two parts of these types of deal would be: signing contracts and exchanging invoices. The CRM will help them to keep all these documents in order and meet all the deadlines.
Content Licensing
Not all small organizations can afford to create their own top-notch content. But it would be unreasonable to miss this promotional opportunity, so you can order or purchase licensed content with third parties. The CRM will help you to target these materials to an appropriate audience. The system allows you to segment and structures your customers. You can quickly decide which type of content each segment would be most interested in.
Track Your Competitors
A clear understanding of rivals' competitive edges is vital for businesses of any scale and sphere of activity. They should realize the strong and weak points of their competitors in order to build improvement strategies. They should know why customers choose their products and services and not those of their rivals. To obtain these insights, you should accumulate large bulks of data in your CRM and thoroughly analyze them.
Estimate Your Chances of Losing a Client
After losing a deal, you can indicate in the CRM the reason for your failure. When the database accumulates dozens of cases, you can analyze them to reveal patterns. Based on your negative experience, you will improve your product and sales strategy. Your team will avoid committing the same mistake in the future. Most CRMs have a special blank cell for that purpose that managers need to fill in. Otherwise, they would switch to the next lead as soon as the previous one failed to convert into a sale and draw no conclusions.
To analyze clients' motivations, compile a unified pattern for their refusals. You might ask the respondents to formulate their opinion like this: "I chose your competitor's product over yours because it is better in this and that aspect".
Create Detailed Client Profiles
A client's profile in a good CRM contains numerous fields. When you first look at it, you might wonder: which data should you introduce there? Is it not enough to feed the CRM with the customer's name, email and phone number? That would be a misleading approach.
As it was described above using the example of journalists, people like it when you remember their personal preferences. If you offer them a generalized good or service, their motivation to buy it can be classified as "average". But if you offer them precisely what they want from the onset, they will be much more interested in it. Detailed profiles in the CRM enable you to better understand your competitive benefits and build an efficient sales strategy based on this knowledge.
Thanks to automation and the integrated analytical instruments of your CRM, you can answer these questions:
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Who are the early adopters of the advanced features you present?
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Which customer categories stop using your product after the first purchase?
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Will it make sense to compulsory switch off the previous versions of your product?
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Which sections of your website or app are its visitors most interested in?
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Do your clients read the posts that you write for them? If yes, which type of content do the like best?
These were just a few examples. The CRM will enable you to obtain much more information, at an impressive speed and with great precision.
Measure Customer Engagement
The CRM enables you to track all the steps that the client takes ever since they displayed an interest in your goods or services. Using CRM, you can analyze how often the customer orders your products — it may be once every two months, for instance. 55 days after their previous purchase, you can send them an email reminding them that the time has come for the next order. This will also be a smart opportunity to invite your customers to discounts or special offers. In the CRM, you can set and automate all the necessary triggers.
Retain Your Clients
If you do not want to lose your clients, you should maintain constant contact with them. The CRM allows you to set up follow-up actions. Later, it will timely remind you of the measures that you should take.
The CRM lets you know about all the offers that your clients reject, the orders they cancel and the complaints they leave. This gives you an opportunity to react promptly and convince the customer to come back.
Conclusion
A CRM is a powerful and versatile instrument that easily copes with multitasking. Maybe, you will discover other ways to apply it apart from those that were described in this article. Once you install a CRM, ask its developer to conduct training for your team. The best systems are rather complicated and it might be difficult for your staffers to figure out by themselves how they function. Once you invent another productive use for your CRM, schedule another training session. All your employees need to share an identical vision of the system's advantages and opportunities. Ultimately, CRM should help you to optimize your workflow and boost your revenue.
