Decisions are just a part of life, and as a business owner and/or manager, some decisions are easy and some aren’t so easy to make. Deciding what’s going to propel your business forward can often be one of the tough ones, especially with so many available options. It’s hard to identify what will work and what won’t. However, there are a few things you just can’t live without anymore.
Invest in a Complete CRM (CRM + Marketing Automation + Operations)
Traditional CRM is great for basic contact management. It helps you organize your contacts, collect some important data points about them and helps you keep track of your notes and interactions. Overall, that may have been sufficient back in the day, but in the digital age, Traditional CRM just doesn’t cut it anymore.
On the other hand, Complete CRM is more than just a platform; it’s a strategy and mindset. It involves the entire company, from sales to marketing to operations. No department (or employee) left behind. A Complete CRM helps you develop and maintain important and long-lasting business relationships. You might be asking, “What’s the difference then?” Let’s explore.
Complete CRM:
– Bridges the gap between sales, marketing, and operations
– Delivers a 360-degree view of your customer (bringing in marketing, sales, and operations data)
– Breaks down silos to increase overall collaboration and team productivity
– Actively tracks your marketing efforts and how they affect sales
– Establishes more accurate sales funnels
– Segments your contacts and deliver more timely sales and marketing messages
– Automates your sales, marketing, and operations processes to help you save time and reduce operations costs
– Offers multichannel/omnichannel experiences
Complete CRM sits at the base of your business to help you achieve efficiency in all departments while significantly increasing conversions.
Why Marketing Data is so Important
In the age of complete digitalization, it is more important than ever to effectively execute, manage, and track all your marketing efforts. This means gaining insight into a 360-degree view of your lead and/or customer and thoroughly understanding how they interact and engage with your organization. If you are looking to significantly better your customer experience then you need to know what the customer journey looks like and identify the holes in your process. Because marketing plays such a large role in the sales process, marketing data should never be overlooked.
With a Complete CRM, you have access to the following:
– Valuable insight into your customer at all stages of the funnel
– Knowledge for turning marketing qualified leads into sales qualified leads with effective lead nurturing and customer journey mapping
– Insight into the types of content your leads and customer demand
– Data to help seamlessly re-engage cold leads
– Information about how your leads utilize your website, respond to your messages, etc.
– Essential data to help you test, revise, and execute successful campaigns for your leads at every stage of the funnel
A lot of you might be saying, “I get all of this data from my marketing software.” To which I respond, “Is it integrated with your CRM?” Most the time, the answer is always the same, “not really.” This is where the problem lies. You absolutely must integrate the two so that the data live together in the same platform. When you start exporting and importing multiple data sets, you leave room for potentially costly mistakes.
Why Operations Data is so Important
Your overall operations play a large part in your customer experience. From making sure tasks and activities are completed to monitoring your customer support, seamless execution internally results in a seamless customer-centric strategy. When you integrate your operations data with your CRM, you finally have a 360-degree view of your customer and the relationship they have with your organization. This includes billing, customer service, and so forth.
Event management can also fall into this category. Knowing which events your contacts attend and being able to target both your sales and marketing messages based on their attendance, registration options, etc. is powerful when you want to deliver cohesive omnichannel experiences.
All in all, relying on simple CRM data is not going to push your company to the next level. The competition is too steep today and the modern customer demands this type of experience.
If your CRM is no longer meeting the needs of your team, it is definitely not producing the effect you want to have on your leads and customers.
Insightful article you got here, Alessandra. Making the mind tick with this intriguing question also worked for you. Any CRM will really be enough if a company knows how to maximize them. If they look for ones that allow integration, it would open up a world of opportunities than relying on the CRM alone. Thank you for also providing a list of features and capabilities that a CRM should have for it to be considered enough. Further, let me share this article on how they can bring the best out of their CRM to improve sales. https://www.tenfold.com/crm/best-use-crm-improve-phone-sales/