Customer Relationship Management, or known as CRM, is a technology created to help businesses to build a better relationship with customers. The ultimate goal of CRM technology is to improve the relationship of the company and customers, streamline the process, and improve the income or sales.
The CRM solution not only caters to the company’s customers. But it goes beyond the colleagues, suppliers, distributors, and more. It encompasses all the crucial parts of the company because forgetting one aspect can affect the entire organization.
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Why is CRM Important?
Why is CRM so vital for the growth of a business? Is it possible to run a business without investing in one? Let’s find out what are the benefits of CRM and what can it do for your business.
Build a stronger relationship with customers
It’s challenging to get new customers or audiences to buy your products than to encourage loyal or previous customers. Since you know more about them from the data you’ve gathered, it would be easy to create a personalized campaign to reach out to them.
In this way, personalizing your campaign based on your customers, would put them back on track and build a better relationship with them.
Information is provided to the entire team
For teamwork to be achieved, information from one department to another must be shared or handed down to get a better result. With CRM software, it automatically collects all the data such as email, calendar, phone calls, and more, and stores in an accessible place.
Anyone with access can see this information and use it to lead the potential customer down the pipeline and close a sale. Each department that requires information will be updated. Then, it would improve the services offered and make the customer satisfied.
Saves valuable time
With quite a lot of information about your customers, it’s tough to manage all of it at once, whether you have a team or you do it on your own. That’s why CRM works because it automates most of the tedious or repetitive jobs.
It organizes all the data in one place so that when you need it, it would be easy to search the database. You can look for your customers’ details, sales report, or marketing campaigns you have run.
Furthermore, it can automate emails, follow-ups, and order messages.
Better understand your business
CRM doesn’t just organize your data, save time, or build a relationship. It also provides insights and solutions to your business. It will dive deep into the data you have gathered, and you’ll learn how your customers respond to your business and your campaign, and what should be done to make it work.
The data provided by a CRM can help in making decisions regarding your campaign or marketing strategies.
Include all of your audience
CRM allows you to group your contacts into a single dashboard. You can group your audience based on their behavior or category. CRM can help you send a campaign to a specific group, but if a group of people doesn’t fall on a specific category, you can add a customized tag.
Customize tags are unique identifiers you add to your audiences to include them on a specific campaign that’s not part of a group. It would allow you to reach out to a wider group of people and build your business.
Value your customers
With CRM, you’ll be able to keep data of your most valued customer. These people purchase all the time and are most likely to recommend your brand.
CRM will store this information for you, so if you want to show appreciation to them, it would be easy to gather the information and send special offers or discounts to them.
Now that you have an idea of what CRM can do, let’s figure out what are the three main functions of CRM software to businesses.
Three General Business Functions That CRM Software Serves
There are three general functions of CRM software, and this includes:
- Sales Force Automation
- Marketing Automation
- Customer Service Automation
Let’s get to know what are these three functions and how they affect the growth of a business.
1. Sales Force Automation
First in the list of business functions that CRM software serves is Sales Force Automation (SFA). It’s when the sales part of a business is automated with software tools. Usually, these tools take care of repetitive tasks to save the time of a sales representative. Hence, allowing to enhance productivity and increase sales for the team.
SFA tools can automate any task given, and it also includes the reporting and analytics tools for the management of performance and prediction of revenue.
One good example of SFA is automated email replies. When using SFA, it will send automated replies or emails to your leads when they failed to respond to your first email.
CRM software is not similar to SFA. However, SFA’s tools and features can be part of the CRM. SFA or CRM can both stand alone or be part of other marketing tools.
Purpose of Sales Force Automation
- Focus the sales team on crucial tasks by freeing their time on administrative or repetitive work. They can work on increasing sales.
- It streamlines the sales process by automating emails or calls for efficiency.
- Provide insights to help managers see or have an overview of how the sales team is working or going about. It also helps adjust their plans to make it more effective.
2. Marketing Automation
For marketing automation, it targets a wider audience and offers products or services to them. It delivers a more persuasive message as compared to an automated sales force.
Furthermore, marketing automation is focused on lead nurturing, prospective customers, and inbound marketing strategies. It also helps understand your audience and their behavior.
Businesses using marketing automation can send automated messages using email, web, or social. There are ready-made templates often available.
Benefits of Using Marketing Automation:
- Maximizes efficiency by automating time-consuming and repetitive manual tasks.
- Reduces human-errors.
- Generates more quality leads to achieve better sales.
- For creating a more comprehensive prospect profile.
- Sales and marketing team work hand-in-hand.
- Increases conversion rate and ROI. It increases by 10% in their sales pipeline.
3. Customer Service Automation
The last business function that CRM software serves is Customer Service Automation. This technology reduces manual labor or human job when assisting customers or clients. Tools such as AI chatbots, workflow automation, IVR, and intelligent routing are features seen in some automated customer service.
Advantages of Customer Service Automation
- Less human errors.
- Human agents can now focus on learning a new skill or be productive in other aspects.
- No need to hire more employees, which means less expense.
- It goes with the changing time because there are more tech-savvy users than before. They prefer automation, and they’ll embrace these changes.
- Minimizes the time waiting for a response, which increases the chance of closing a sale.
The Best CRM Software You can Try for Your Business
- HubSpot CRM
- Bitrix24
- Agile CRM
- Salesforce
- Dynamics 365
Conclusion
Using CRM for your marketing and sales team can benefit and help your business. CRM can grow your business to what you have always wanted. It brings you closer to your goal. There is a lot of CRM software in the market you can choose from. If you are ready to take your business a step further, then get yourself a copy now.
Remember, CRM allows your business to grow with little human effort but with great efficiency.
