Do you know CRM and what it means? It sounds trivial, but it is a necessary step to help sales, marketing and customer care teams get more feedback in their work. It applies to those who run an eCommerce and therefore have a B2C approach, but also to those who deal with B2B.
If the value is not shared, adoption will always be sufficient and therefore ineffective for feedback to be visible and measurable for all.
We want to talk to you about CRM in a simple and concrete way starting with the needs we collect every day.
As you know every business needs to keep track of prospects and customers. But how?
It's strange to say this, but some don't think about it at all, in the sense that they haven't yet organized to do so, others use spreadsheets and notes arranged here and there, making management difficult not to say impossible.
Operations carried out manually and in an unstructured manner, in addition to requiring time and energy, can find obstacles in sudden and unpredictable changes. As a company grows, for example, the need to quickly organize all information also grows. That's why we hope you can take advantage of the opportunities of a CRM as a business tool allied to your days and goals by fully understanding its significance.
If it wasn't in your plans yet, it's time to adopt a CRM to protect and enhance all your data for the benefit of your customers and therefore your revenue as well.
Because sooner or later even those contacts that seem marginal today may come in handy tomorrow for your initiatives.
CRM what it is, how it works, and significance
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, it is a kind of smart address book, shared within the company, that helps you manage customer relationships. How? By storing all the interactions that take place between your company's customers and prospects.
A company's CRM stores all interactions with prospective and existing customers. This includes everything: the exact time they opened your email, the phone calls made and received, the world in which they browsed your website, the content they dwelled on most, but also chat and social interactions that thus involve all your touch points.
This data provides detailed context to all teams on each customer's activity and feedback, with the ability to offer personalized services and better support.
A CRM therefore helps your team save valuable time and always come across as prepared and bright even with first-time users, because it can recognize them from previous interactions, not disappointing their expectations.
Naturally like all the solutions we talk about, the CRM we suggest works in the cloud so it allows access from any device and browser securely.
CRM marketing: the winning strategy for all businesses
What we are interested in getting you to understand is the importance of CRM and the deep meaning it could have for your company, whether it is a startup or a larger entity.
For now we want to talk to you about this tool without recommending this or that solution, as we will perhaps do in more detail in future articles.
A CRM provides an easy-to-use centralized interface for all your work teams. We have summarized below the added value a CRM offers to all businesses:
- Better customer experience
When you know your potential customer through a CRM, it's much easier to provide a positive buying experience. Knowing quickly which product they prefer, which blog article they found interesting, what content in your email they dwelled on, gives your approach and sales strategies a major advantage. This way you can personalize your messaging and provide more value from the first few lines, because you're not referring to everyone, but to a specific person.
- More productivity
With a CRM you can automate tasks such as call recording and much more such as creating reports and contracts. The less time you spend on administrative work, the more hours you allocate to potential customers, benefiting your revenue.
- Effective Collaboration
In essence, a CRM increases the collaboration and efficiency of the whole team. Let's take a few examples: the sales team manager can consult in real time how and when his agents are contacting and following up with prospects. Agents on the same team of course can access the best practices that have worked the most to make their activities perform better. Everyone can continue to manage work without interruption or hesitation even if someone gets sick or goes on vacation, because data is shared in real time.
- Smart decisions supported by data
A CRM gives you a clear snapshot of the performance of your entire team or individual agents, showing conversion rates for each stage of your Pipeline, with focus on velocity and finalized turnovers. Think of how many winning strategies you can build from these insights.
What are the advantages of a CRM system?
A CRM offers your business 8 benefits:
- Organize your data. The CRM helps you organize information from all of your contacts. This allows your team to keep track of who interacted with customer and what they discussed. In sales, this information aligns your team so your sales process runs smoothly.
- Sales reporting. Monitor goal achievement and metrics such as emails sent, calls made, meetings booked, and negotiations closed to understand what your team is doing well and what you can do to improve.
- Accurate sales forecasts. Don't rely on complicated Excel formulas or mathematical calculations. A good CRM system generates a sales forecast, simplifies revenue forecasting and the management of your team's pipeline.
- Segment your customer base. Segment your leads by properties such as location, deal size, closing date and more, to find the hottest leads to focus on.
- Scale in the sales process. A repeatable sales process is the key to testing new strategies. The data you keep in a CRM will help you identify effective and ineffective patterns in sales behaviors. This knowledge will help you grow your business in a smart way while saving you a lot of time.
- Increased employee satisfaction. With so many things to do, your agents can lose sight of priorities. A CRM will scan and streamline their day through circumscribed functions such as tasks. This way they will spend more time generating new revenue instead of doing organizational tasks manually.
- Aligning between teams. Imagine contacting a lead who has already heard from your colleague. This turns out to be not only awkward, but also a waste of time. With a CRM, you can see the profiles of your contacts and access the latest communications. This can be extremely useful if your CRM also works with marketing and customer service teams. You never lose the thread of the conversation!
- Increased revenue and profitability. This is what we all dream of. The benefits listed above help make your company more effective in closing deals. In turn, you will get ROI on your CRM and scale your revenue more than you did before.
CRM definitions
If the opportunity for a CRM is beginning to make inroads, before we dive into the details of its use, we want to familiarize ourselves with some keywords.
Contact: a contact is a single person. Most CRMs will ask you to record first name, last name, and email address. Of course you can also keep track of details such as role or company name.
Lead: A lead is one who has expressed an interest in your product/service. It could be a qualified lead from marketing (interacted with your content, such as an ebook or blog article) or from sales (filled out a form to offer a trial).
Offer: also known as opportunity. An offer is a potential sale. A contract should go through various stages of the sales process. Link contacts to offers. If you are working with multiple colleagues on a single purchase, they should be associated with that contract record.
Company: If you sell to companies so yours is a B2B, you can track which contacts and deals are linked to. CRM usually proposes the "Company" record among the first entries (you could associate 10 different contacts and 3 different deals to a single company).
Source: your contacts come from different sources: the forms on your website, telemarketing initiatives, events, webinars, and so on. Keeping track of this allows you to focus on the most effective channels for your conversions.
Activities: any action taken by your agents or prospects generally falls under this umbrella, including calls, emails, demos, a new contact record, an updated field.
Phase of the deal : Every stage of the sales process should be represented. To give you an idea, your agents start interacting with 100 percent of the prospects, whom they then acquire, with an exploratory call. So the "exploratory call" could be the first stage of the deal in your CRM.
Pipeline:The stages of negotiation are organized into pipelines. Each agent should have his or her own pipeline in the CRM so that he or she can keep track of opportunities currently in progress. As a deal gets closer to closing, it should move from left to right.
How to use a CRM?
power2Cloud can suggest the best CRM for your business. In fact, in the next article we will discuss HubSpot and its features.
As we said at the beginning, seeking advocates for CRM adoption is vital because everyone must use it to keep it up-to-date and functional. As with other aspects, everyone in the company must speak the same language!
In addition to the opportunities mentioned it is possible to customize the settings,in fact, the CRM should reflect your sales process. For this it will be important to accurately map all the stages that a "lead" goes through as it moves from "opportunity" to "customer".
If you think about it, this work also helps you think about your sales cycle more analytically.
How long does it take from initial contact to agreement to finalizing a contract? What are the steps in between?
In addition to the default properties such as phone number, email address, and so on, you can also add other customizations such as "Billing ID," "Time Zone," "Purchased Product."
If you are concerned about migrating from your spreadsheets to the new CRM, the power2Cloud team will organize your data to transfer smoothly from the old to the new system.
Another important aspect we always insist on is the integration of CRM with your business tools. This is important to continue to centralize all the information you collect voluntarily or not.
If you don't have a CRM and want to see one in action, we are ready to show you ours. As HubSpot's partner in Italy in fact, we are also very happy to tell you about our experience as users. What are you waiting for?"