Growing industry leaders, pioneers, and visionaries recognize that it is a business imperative to have an innovative CRM platform in place in order for them to successfully execute their customer-centric cultural transformation and strategic initiatives. Unlike many of their competitors, these organizations do not believe they can fully achieve their CX and VoC objectives merely by investing in and implementing a CRM technology solution in which they attempt to replicate existing inefficient business processes.
Instead, these firms relentlessly focus on actually redesigning and automating common customer-facing processes, including marketing campaign execution, prospecting outreach programs, lead conversion, account management, and service inquiry tracking, based on the unique needs of their client base, industry customer experience trends, and corporate growth and productivity goals.
At the heart of their long-term CRM journey and marketing roadmap is a leading-edge CRM system, which truly has become the enabler and driver of their overall corporate performance. Nevertheless, prior to rising to the forefront of their industries with the help of a renewed focus on process improvement and a reinvigorated customer-first strategy, many firms definitely struggled with their customer experience transformation.
In fact, before finally graduating from their mishmash of massive excel spreadsheets, homegrown databases, and CRM versions that were so old they were no longer supported by the vendor or their IT staff, these companies encountered many obstacles and symptoms, such as:
- Market share being lost to more upstart, agile competitors.
- Business shrinking and revenue streams declining.
- Close ratios flattening or worsening.
- Average revenue per sale decreasing and the cost of sales rising.
- Average sales cycles and the number of calls to close rising.
- The number of new deals won per month and per quarter shrinking.
- Account relationships terminating at alarming rates.
- Top sales producers leaving the company with greater frequency.
- Sales leads and opportunities not inputted in a standard format or monitored in a central, reportable fashion.
- Forecasted sales missed and anticipated close dates rarely on target.
- Products and services offered to clients that already have them.
- Performance metrics including actual sales results versus target goals not utilized.
- Referrals from existing customers falling and recommendations from third-party sources drying up.
- Reasons deals are won and lost not being tracked.
- Specific deal origination lead sources not identified.
- Sales reps re-entering customer data for quotes and orders.
- Sales team members spending too much time on administrative tasks.
- AEs, RMs, and call center agents lacking a single version of the truth on clients and prospects.
- Multiple disparate, legacy systems that do not synchronize data used for sales, marketing, and customer service functions.
- Key accounts disputing payments and incoming customer complaints increasing.
After upgrading or switching to a more powerful, cutting-edge CRM system and having it serve as the cornerstone application for their customer experience optimization strategic initiatives, though, business and IT stakeholders are finally able to make the aforementioned extensive list of challenges disappear, and thus they can turbocharge their digital CX transformation.
The business stakeholders benefit because their CRM users are now experiencing increased productivity from the more simplified navigation, enhanced reporting and analytics, greater consistency in sales processes, and cleaner data with less de-duplication. As a result, internal and external communication is optimized, lead conversions soar, customer relationships are enhanced, and CLTV elevates.
Plus, now that IT is no longer having to support an outdated, inflexible platform, they can lessen development time, respond faster to user change requests, reduce their risk, and lower the overall TCO. It’s a win-win all around.
Always be innovating…always! Don’t get left behind! Full speed ahead!
