Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are helpful tools for a range of departments – from sales and marketing to accounts receivable and operations. It can help your business find holes in your marketing strategies to closing the invoicing gaps.
Since Concept’s beginning, we have relied heavily on CRM to support both our business internally and to help our clients grow through our Salesforce consulting services. We serve as a Salesforce and HubSpot partner who provide solutions that help our clients make the most of their CRM platform.
Here are the top 8 ways CRM helped us – and can help your business go to the next level.
1. Share important information about clients/customers electronically
How many times have you received a printed copy of an email about a prospect or sales lead that you later misplaced? Or have you brainstormed new industries you go after but don’t know how many clients you currently serve in that particular area?
Salesforce has a great tool called Salesforce Chatter where you can connect, collaborate, and act within a secured environment. You can follow people or create groups within your company’s private internal network. You can also tag people, collaborate on sales opportunities, service cases or projects. Each user can manage what type of notifications they receive from Chatter. Imagine being able to utilize this in your business and streamlining so many emails, phone calls, or popping into someone’s office.
2. Transparency
Another bonus to Salesforce, it gives you a 360-degree view of your customers. You’ll be able to see every angle of every relationship – who they are, what stage of deal they’re in, and interactions between your sales department and your customers.
3. Reporting
Does it take several hours to figure out how much customers owe to your accounts receivable? Are you able to easily see converted leads as new clients?
A CRM can create important operational reports for your business, so you can see how things are performing at-a-glance. Salesforce is a powerful CRM that can slice and dice your data in various ways. Want to see what sources your new leads came from? Use a CRM to get all this type of information at your fingertips.
4. Contact information
Do you have a stack of business cards in a desk drawer? Utilize a CRM to manage contact information for all your prospects and customers. See what pages on your website they visited and use that to help build stronger, more meaningful conversations.
5. Mailing lists
If you like to send mailers or email campaigns out, how easy is it for you to pull a mailing list together? With a CRM, you could pull a list with a couple of clicks. And since all the customer/prospect information is housed in the CRM, you can begin to talk to people more specifically – about what their specific needs are.
6. Log everything
CRMs allow you to track conversations, whether through email, chat, or phone, you can see when the last contact was made. And you can see how the conversation went. Need to confirm a quote if a salesperson is out for the day? No problem! Use your CRM to find the original quote and close that deal.
7. Plan tasks and activities
Within HubSpot and Salesforce, use your CRM to schedule tasks like following up with a new prospect. Don’t worry about relying on your or someone’s else memory. Let your CRM do the work for you. Put your priorities into your CRM and let it help guide you on your daily tasks.
8. Automation
While the name sums it up, automation is essential when it comes to the execution of effective marketing strategies. Once you develop the ideal journey of a prospect or a customer, a marketing automation tool allows you to ensure the journey is executed at the exact time and trigger you prefer. Rather than relying on individual team members to execute each of these activities, effectively leveraging a marketing automation platform can improve efficiencies and save both time and money.
Ready for the Next Step?
If a CRM sounds like it could assist your business and help take you to the next level, then it’s important to work with a certified CRM partner.
By choosing a CRM team with years of experience, you’ll have peace-of-mind that you will better utilize your monetary resources with a certified team who can handle all aspects of CRM management.
*Updated 6/1/2020