Why use CRM for your business?
You should use CRM software for your business because it optimizes marketing strategies, improves upselling efforts, and enhances customer relations. In addition to these, having these tools will allow you to leverage your customer data to make adjustments to your operations as well as streamline a variety of sales and marketing tasks.
10 Reasons Why You Should Use CRM Software
1. More Optimized Marketing Strategies
A large portion of our readers looking to compare various CRM solutions are, in fact, startup companies and low-tier service providers still building up a market profile. This doesn’t come as a surprise, knowing how useful CRM tools can be to motivate buyers to turn to a specific vendor.
How does it work? Companies are continually performing market research looking to target the ideal customer profile, and CRMs help them understand customers’ behavior and tackle their specific needs. Another important task they perform is to identify the best time to promote and present services to those customers and use the results of such strategies to further expand the list of prospects. CRM systems also have a positive effect on efficient resource allocation, as businesses relying on reputed software are also the favorites among profitable market groups. Put into perspective, a CRM product will help you target the right leads at the right time and with the right resources.
2. Increased Workflow Efficiency
Speaking of the information delivered by CRM systems, we should also explain how it deals with the valuable time businesses lose, combining methods to evaluate their customers’ behavior. CRM software solutions consolidate different methods, practices, and tools needed to track customer activity, and finally spare you from double entries and the dull, automated approach customers find so frustrating. With a good system in place, you will eliminate all costly manual errors, and still make each customer feel as if he was the most valuable lead you have at the moment.
3. Enhanced Customer Data Analysis
There is a lot to learn from how your customers accept and evaluate your service, but marketing optimization is by far the most valuable data you will pull out. CRM systems teach you how to “energize” promotional campaigns, and promote products to unfamiliar audiences that will statistically be interested in them. The powerful standard and custom reports delivered by most CRMs also provide a clear insight into the health of each operation, the performance of each agent, and the overall sustainability of your relationship management strategy. Believe it or not, this is the source most successful companies turn to identify bottlenecks, rather than to spend hours analyzing financial data.
4. Better Customer Relations
The most important rule when running a customer-focused business is a simple one: you will be successful as long as your customers are satisfied. This is where CRM systems help the most, as they drive your marketing, invoicing, and selling efforts in the right direction. To start with, a CRM will help you organize all customer-related operations, from automated welcoming messages to service and checkout. Being able to understand what they expect from you, you will also decrease their agitation and collect valuable feedback that matters to the future placement of your products and services.
Satisfactory and efficient service delivered at all times and on all channels (email, phone, social media, web forms, surveys, etc.) also guarantees that you will be warmly recommended to customers acquaintances, and grow your customer base using nothing but what you’ve already invested.
5. Easier Customer Data Access
A part of CRM’s standardized data organizing strategy is to keep all relevant details in a knowledge base from where all agents can access them (in most cases, depending on the roles and permissions they’ve been assigned with). That database is usually cloud-hosted, and all it takes to get there are the right credentials and a good internet connection. As expected, most of today’s popular CRM systems are fully mobile-optimized, and thus accessible from all devices, browsers, and operating systems. Some of them also provide dedicated apps for Android and iOS users.
6. Simplified Agent Performance Tracking
Many business owners rely on their CRM systems to understand how agents are performing and develop intelligent strategies on how to assign leads and tasks in the future. It is also the CRM system where they know who are the people available at the moment, and divert inquiries to other departments in case the agent requested is not available. Practically, the CRM makes each employee’s schedule visible and helps compare who is closing the most or the least of the company’s deals. Recently, CRM developers have been exploring the gamification concept that lets admins award top performers with bonuses, points, or even promotions.
7. Improved Cross-Selling and Upselling
The ultimate goal of using a CRM system is always to trigger it for deal closure, which is why the best-of-breed systems always support practices, such as upselling and cross-selling. In the upselling case, they draw intelligence from the customer’s current purchase to bring similar products to his attention and rely on tags and categories you’ve previously inserted. Cross-selling is also a part of the game, where the system tracks a customer’s previous purchases to suggest new products and to get an idea of what he’ll be looking for. All details are then stored in a centralized database. Ideally, in an individual customer profile, the agent can always turn to and see who he’s dealing with. A good CRM will be delegated the task of spotting and using opportunities, and will, therefore, end up boosting your profits.
8. Streamlined Invoicing
Most of today’s CRM platforms are equipped with at least some basic financial management tools, and the rationale for this is to stop you from extracting sensitive sales data to a third-party system. In the perfect scenario, you will be able to create quotes, prepare, and send invoices to your customers from the same platform where you’ve completed their order. You can also automate other time and expense-related paperwork, streamline the experience of your customers, and make sure money always arrive on time.
Certain CRM products also integrate with leading payment gateways to help users complete payment and checkouts without abandoning your website/e-store.
9. Unified Social Media Management
We can’t deny social media the credit for most of what modern businesses are earning, as platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or LinkedIn are great pools for finding potential contacts and deal opportunities. At the same time, both large and small businesses find it challenging to maintain an active presence on all of them and personally respond to all inquiries and questions without losing focus on the rest of their work.
CRMs do a notable job here as well. Most cloud-based CRM solutions of today are tightly integrated with social platforms, and allow you to post automatically and manage all of your profiles from a single platform. Some of them even go as far as to alert you to deadlines and opportunities or collect all product-related mentions and comments for you to respond on time. For instance, you can adjust the settings of your CRM to depict any desired type of social activity by simply selecting keywords such as “customer support,” “customer service,” and many more.
10. Access to Scalable CRM Solutions
Just a decade ago, powerful CRM systems were considered to be enterprise-exclusive products, which was a reasonable thing to believe with their high spinning prices and complex installations. Luckily, developers saw small businesses as the ideal audience in need of such products and started working on their cloud-hosted versions that require neither lengthy implementation times nor bank-breaking amounts.
It is easy to find a great CRM at a reasonable price these days, and at the same time, get a confirmation that no recurrent costs or maintenance fees will apply in the future. Some are even offered as free CRM apps, which is why we recommend even newly launched businesses to get one and try it out.
