Customers reveal key information during every interaction with your company, from the initial contact to the first purchase and onward to any post-sales activity. Thus, it is crucial that firms accurately, consistently, and efficiently collect, store, and internally share this data. Ultimately, the objective is to develop a single and integrated 360-degree view of all client activity in such a way that this rich data is centrally located and available to all levels of the organization, regardless of the channel. Implementing a leading-edge, intuitive, and scalable CRM and improving your business processes to be more streamlined, transparent, and easier to execute for all employees is the best way to achieve the “holy grail” of the comprehensive and more clear 360-degree view.
Having one updated and universal client, patient, prospect, supplier, partner, or investor profile helps firms better relate to their customers and stakeholders on a deeper, personal level. The keen insights derived from the 360-degree view allow marketing, sales, and service teams to have a more solid understanding of their clients’ past interactions, planned interactions, “hot buttons”, key business objectives, buying history, and purchasing preferences. Therefore, employees across various departments, regardless of office location across the globe, find it much easier to:
- Prepare more diligently for strategic account reviews, cold calls, and onsite presentations and demos.
- Anticipate and understand the buyer’s needs, identify more cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, and shorten sales cycles.
- Gauge client and prospect long-term potential more precisely to spend more time with truly qualified and promising leads to improve close ratios.
- Respond more efficiently to interested parties with timely, value-added information and recommendations that drive them to order and invest in your product or service.
- Forecast deals more accurately to aid revenue, inventory, and staffing projections and exceed aggressive sales targets.
- Collaborate more effectively with other internal departments to target the right clients at the right time to reduce marketing costs and make more profitable business decisions.
- Onboard and train new sales hires more quickly so that service levels are upheld and customers do not become frustrated with having to explain their story and unique company needs for a second, third, or even fourth time to a new account manager.
- Provide a differentiated, first-class level of service and enhance client satisfaction.
It’s evident that, by serving as a central repository, CRM optimizes integrations and captures data from multiple disconnected systems. All in all, the truly integrated 360-degree client view in CRM gives users quality data they can confidently act on to connect or reconnect with customers and better serve them to maximize CLV. Thus, user productivity and response times increase, as does the likelihood of user adoption and implementation success.
It’s a win-win all the way around. IT with tighter integrations and better data are happy. Business users are more efficient and it’s now far easier to serve their highly demanding clients so they are happy, too. Executives receive more accurate, concise client profiles and they can now place more faith in their individual, team, department, office, market, region, and firm performance reports so they also are happy. Most importantly, your customers will be happy since they will immediately pick up on the fact that you know exactly what’s going on with their account, product, or service. In fact, they’ll be so amazed at how fast you can help them that they will be more inclined to stay as a client or even bring you more business in the future.
If your firm still finds itself struggling to cut through the noise to quickly get the information you need on client relationships, your long term sustainability is at risk.
In order to improve your business and financial performance and drive consistent and measurable improvements in your marketing outreach, pre-call planning, client meeting prep activities, sales closing, and ongoing service processes, it’s imperative that you renew your commitment to CRM and implement and achieve a 360-degree client view ASAP!
What challenges does your organization encounter in developing or leveraging your own 360-degree client view in CRM? Feel free to leave a comment below.
