What is CRM?

Customer relationship management, or simply put CRM, is an approach that companies adopt to monitor and analyse customer and prospect relationships. A CRM system:

• Stores prospects’ contact information – their names, email addresses, phone numbers and other relevant information.
• Groups different contacts working at an organisation under one account.
• Logs a sale rep’s interactions with the prospects – phone calls, voice mails, email exchanges, live chat, social media interactions, in-person meetings/demos, etc.
• Updates deal stages and pipelines.
• Logs reasons for closed won and closed lost sales.
• Centralises, simplifies and scales your customer engagement.

Is a CRM system really worth it?

A Customer base is the most valuable asset of any business – big or small. At many companies, the customer information is scattered all over the place – spreadsheets, marketer’s email marketing tool, CEO’s mind, finance team’s records and sales rep’s emails.

Many businesses still rely on the spreadsheets that get bulkier with every passing day when the business is growing. This is counterproductive for marketing (to run different campaigns) and sales teams that need to hunt down a prospect’s or customer’s information from different sources. Selling becomes a painful task for the sales rep. In such a scenario, it becomes difficult for sales managers to accurately forecast or assess the team’s pipeline. All this results in more chaos and fewer won deals.

A CRM system is designed to run the sales process seamlessly and free up the time a sales rep invests manually logging in contact information and interactions, so that s/he can do their core job – selling – well.

Here are 5 top ways a CRM system can elevate a company’s ailing marketing and sales ecosystem.

• Centralised customer and prospect database management: A CRM is not just designed for leads; even customers data can be documented there for it to be easily accessed by the customer success and finance teams to touch base with the customers, regularly. By organising all lead and customer data in one place makes it easy for all the teams to be in sync with each other while catering to the specific needs of each prospect and customer.
• Improved lead intelligence for sales: When you integrate your CRM system with the marketing software, your sales team can easily access all lead intelligence from one place. Your sales reps can discover some key information about a lead, and keep on adding information about their contact record within the CRM. This can serve as a treasure trove of information about a contact, and anyone from your organisation would have a complete picture about that contact while speaking or interacting with the lead.
• Improved marketing and sales alignment: A CRM is a marketing and sales team alignment enabler. Both marketing and sales team have their pre-set targets to hit monthly or quarterly. A good CRM system lets both the teams have visibility into the each other’s performance and goals. It helps the teams to devise and refine their strategies accordingly. Real-time reporting can also be set up for the sales team to have access to marketing team’s lead quota and the goals hit, and the marketing team can see if the sales team is following up with those leads.
• Enhanced productivity: A large number of businesses still use manual processes to function in marketing and sales. This results in the loss of a considerable amount of time and effort. Nevertheless, a CRM makes things easier and replaces the tedious manual processes by automating data entry and other mundane tasks. It’s an organisation-wide boon. Since a CRM organises all lead and customer information in one place, your teams can do away with the cumbersome email chains. More organised data, less confusion and more conversions.
• Accurate sales forecasting: A CRM gives complete visibility into the sales pipeline. The sales managers need not do any back-of-the-napkin math or use complicated formulas to forecast the sales for the month or quarter. A CRM system generates an accurate sales funnel for you, which makes it easier to manage your team’s pipeline smartly and forecast future sales accurately.

All of that sounds great, right?

As you weigh the pros and cons of adopting CRM software, it’s important to consider the potential risks of low productivity and high probabilities of inaccuracies, if you still continue to function without it.

Do you want to scale up your business? If your answer is affirmative, contact us discuss your requirements more specifically to enable optimal growth for your organisation.