For small and mid-sized companies to survive in a competitive business environment they must adopt efficient and effective strategies for selling, marketing and serving their customers.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) refers to a software and business practices that will improve performance, promote collaboration and give better visibility in clients relationship. It is costly to set up CRM and if your company is going through budget constraints you can consider going for CRM software financing. This will give your company a chance to pay the amount over a given period of time while enjoying numerous advantages of CRM.
Five Reasons Why You Should Consider Using CRM for Your Business:
#1 Customer Data is Integrated and Viewed in a Single Point
Many businesses keep important and valuable data about their clients in various locations and in different formats such as Excel, accounting systems, filofax, outlook and many others. This can easily lead to waste of valuable time while trying to piece together all the information from different systems.
Employees come up with workarounds that allow them to cope up with this. Incase you have new staff on board these workaround might not work.
CRM will create a single view where all the employees can check the clients’ information and update the data anytime based on their interaction. The habits and preferences of your clients can be processed into a central database which will include the history of transactions and billing.
#2 It’s an Effective System for Marketing Campaigns
Having customers’ data in different places creates an obstacle to implement successful telephone, emails or mail-based marketing campaigns. This situation could lead to inaccurate or duplicated client information which could increase the operational costs and also irritate the recipients.
CRM software will help you access vital information about your client such as transactions and billing history which is beneficial in identifying customers when you launch a new product or service. CRM brings the ability to effectively manage your marketing campaigns.
This software is able to group your clients into specific segments which are a based on certain factors such as industry, location, previous purchases, demographics and many others. Segmentation process helps the companies to easily define specific messages for their specific target market areas.
This will ensure that you don’t send the same material to all your clients in different market sectors. You will be able to track the results of your campaign and take necessary decisions based on the information.
#3 Effective Sales Pipeline
Sales pipeline is a concept that consists of various steps starting from the initial contact, series of working stages that helps to understand customer needs and negotiation, and finished with a complete transaction. Businesses that do not apply this concept are sometimes faced with major issues.
One of the problems is that they do not know if they are pursuing adequate sales opportunities that will keep them in business.
Another problem that affects these companies is that they can’t accurately forecast the raw material required or resources which results in excess stock or insufficient employees to fulfill the orders.
CRM helps the sales pipeline concept to be embedded in the company and also provide a tracking mechanism that enables the pipeline to be measured and managed on a daily basis.
#4 Increased Revenue Opportunities
New customer engagement can provide a chance to cross sell or up sell your products. When this portfolio expands the new leads or prospects need to be followed by experienced staffs that have the right information that will ensure they attract new customers. CRM provides a structured approach to customer interactions.
The program partly provides a process for everyone to follow and also link the process according to the specific needs of the client.
#5 Protect Customer Feedback
For many small companies there isn’t a convenient place where they record customer feedback. CRM will help you to capture useful information from a client which will help you to take action. Share this information with the right people in the company through alerts or reports.
Finally build in the lessons learnt and improve the process to avoid the same mistakes repeated again.
CRM will help you control your company and also be able to see things that were previously invisible. Some of these things include the most productive staff, customers that profitable etc.
infographic via Moxie
