Customer Relationship Management automation – is it something you’ve adopted or considered? The trouble with the majority of CRM systems is that they’ve become so far advanced it puts people off.
Endless dashboards, reports, queries, buttons, numbers & metrics makes people feel ‘dumb’ to say the least. This is the trouble, we as human beings always look to make a task easier for ourselves but with this host of choices and different processes it becomes a whirlpool of problems that any new user won’t have enough knowledge to provide a solution.
However the pain you go through setting the CRM system up (correctly!) easily produces a significant ROI in the long run.
To really allow you to understand the benefits of having the picture perfect CRM system we’ve put together these 8 tips below (please be aware that this is just a tiny percentage of all the practically endless reasons you need a CRM system within your business).
#1 Memory – No matter how well you think you can remember a client’s name or address there’s always going to be the inevitable moments when you forget someone’s name – just think of the times you’ve forgotten your pet’s name or family members, they are present every day but your still capable of forgetting.
Once you grow you’ll also expect to bring in new customers, when you have 50 clients to remember you’re going to really struggle in the long run.
#2 Metrics Are King – It doesn’t matter if you track vanity (check back soon for an article on these types of metric) or growth orientated you need to realise that without metrics you’ll begin to throw money away at unproven marketing campaigns or try to work on strategies that just have no chance.
Assuming you’ll be trying various campaigns or trying a new social media strategy you’ll want to see the benefits and growth it has brought on, unfortunately to crown anything a champion it’s down to the numbers they produce.
#3 Customer Knowledge – So you’ve have a week of massive traction, loads of calls and interest has come from a successful campaign – what do you know about the potential customers in terms of when to call back, if they are going to go ahead, are they away next week, when not to call, are they really interested?
Or in other words; information that can either hinder your chances in building a relationship or creating a sales opportunity.
#4 Unified Emails – Say you have an event or competition you want to promote you obviously need to keep everything close knit with design, data merging, mass mail & responses. Using the standard email client is completely out of the question these days (the time it would take to manually input data and everything else would be mind boggling) as it completely limits what you can actually achieve and measure.
Sending emails via a CRM system opens all kinds of opportunities as it allows you to directly link and measure all of the opportunities that comes from that single email. Not only can the team then see what opportunities there are but they can also understand what works and what doesn’t work for potential clients.
The major CRM companies Oracle & Salesforce.com both are investing heavily into Social CRM too!
#5 In House Competition – We are all hungry to succeed, all wanting to be number one within the company – the open tracking of metric allows the whole team/company to see who is doing well and who is doing incredibly well.
Egos may take off but more importantly so will productivity and in house competition, which is always great for creating an exciting atmosphere within the office.
#6 History – Millions are made every day on the stock market because many smart people use history as a trading factor. The same can be said for you and your business as historical results, especially metric related, tend to be responsible for measuring the success of a monthly campaign or the amount of growth you’ve seen year-on-year (or however you like to measure it).
History also has a tendency to get lost in bins, the back of cupboards, under 3 year old magazines, in between cabinets and on the train seat.
With a CRM system the use of effective metric tracking and data entry give you the ability to check results from a quarter on quarter basis for a 5 year period. The overall result is that everything is comparable regardless of the time frame it also means there will be decrease in misplaced history.
#7 Future Predictions – Going back to the history of metrics and importance of it another aspect is that with the CRM being full of so much useful and trackable data you can then begin to predict the future. You’ll have the ability to project future growth going on the basis of solid facts and figures which may have not been truly accessible before.
#8 Organisation – When you get to a certain stage of arranging meetings both internally and externally or general calendar setting tasks you begin to trip over yourself. Boxes get filled, reminders are forgotten/lost and people are late.
CRM makes things easy for you, setting up a date on the calendar and then linking it to a reminder which goes out to your email is quite a wonderful experience.
Being stress free gives you the chance to focus on something else rather than on remembering a date. Ultimately businesses can be either stress free or completely deranged just by the choice they make when it comes to storing all information and data.
Chaos is caused by simply misplacing a ‘hot leads’ number or forgetting about the client meeting you had this afternoon (worth double checking?). The purpose of a CRM system is to limit this chaos and create one incredibly fluid process that makes it easier not only for you but also for any future customers you may have.
