A CRM offers businesses many benefits that help them boost revenue and lifetime customer values, increase sales, nurture leads, improve customer service and product offerings, reveal data trends and sales forecasts and save time.
Cut Down on Time-consuming Administrative Tasks
Automation tools eliminate repetitive tasks from your marketing, sales and customer service team members’ to-do lists, freeing them to focus on what only humans can do. This means more time for your team members to improve their pitch, stay on a little longer to support an upset customer or A/B test to learn how to build the most engaging marketing campaigns.
For example, marketing teams can rely on automation to segment customers, then design, publish and report on targeted campaigns. Likewise, sales reps can automate customer data entry and interaction history, then use the insights to nurture leads via preferred channels.
Boost Sales via Increase Lead Follow-up
Using your CRM for lead tracking, you can gather leads’ preference and behavior data as they go through the sales funnel while also collecting notes on each interaction they have along the way. You can even tag leads based on their stage in the funnel. Then, automate all follow-up tasks and reminders. With all notes in one place, the next steps can be completed expertly by anyone on your team. In the end, more personalization means more conversions.
Tap Into Greater Personalization Through Segmentation
Lead tagging and scoring allow you to define audience segments based on their personal data or stage in the buyer journey. By working on a segment-by-segment basis, this segmentation makes it easy to personalize audience journeys with your company via targeted outreach. In the end, personalization through segmentation leads to better customer experiences and, therefore, more conversions, higher customer retention and even higher customer lifetime values.
You can define leads based on their industry, location, purchase history, conversion stage or how they learned about your brand. Then, use those tags to act on each segment, offering personalized sales outreach, marketing campaigns or upsell opportunities your customers will love. For example, you can launch a marketing campaign that targets leads with sales that make your brand seem in-tune with their in-the-moment needs.
Democratize Stakeholder Knowledge
Your sales and customer service reps often store a plethora of valuable information in their notebooks, heads, calendars and contact lists. Sadly, this means that if a key salesperson leaves, so does this valuable data—data that can otherwise be put to use to drive conversions now and in the future. A CRM works to capture all of that information so that anybody in your company can take the proverbial baton and run with it.
Automate Data Analysis and Reporting
Large data sets, when handled manually, often overwhelm company reps, leading to dropped qualified leads and undervalued customers. A CRM fixes this by capturing leads consistently and customer data automatically, then tracking every interaction or touchpoint with little effort on your team’s behalf. From there, automated data analysis kicks in, creating instant reports that reveal actionable opportunities and reminders to take advantage of them.
Offer On-point Customer Support Every Time
A CRM’s automation tools scale superior customer support. You can use website chatbots to receive complaints or tap into your CRMs knowledge base to automate answers to repeat questions. Then, to elevate complaints, you can use the chatbot to trigger a ticket within your CRM, routing customers to team members who can best respond. Centralized customer notes and histories then help team members anticipate needs and prepare stellar solutions.
Create a Feedback Loop
Your CRM gives you all the capabilities you need to gather interactional data from leads and customers. When CRM data is visible across departments, this data can reveal insights that lend easily to better product or service offerings or more in-tuned marketing campaigns going forward. As such, data insights can be looped back into your lead nurturing and sales processes.
For example, your sales reps may repeatedly make CRM notes revealing that leads hesitate to purchase once prices are discussed. Your CRM can highlight this trend, thereby alerting your marketing team. In response, marketers can create campaigns that highlight newly added or competitive features, making those price bumps seem like bargains. In turn, when newly qualified leads hit the conversion stage, that point of hesitancy is nixed before it forms.
Boost Customer Lifetime Value
CRM software helps businesses offer superior customer support. In addition, they pinpoint upselling and cross-selling opportunities through customer and lead segmentation. They also create feedback loops that consistently lead to improved offerings and free your team members’ time to interact with customers more consistently. In the end, these benefits lead to delightful customer experiences that keep customers coming back to buy more.
Forecast Sales
At some point in our lives, most of us have reflected on how much easier life would be if we could see the future. A CRM offers companies that capability via sales forecasts. Instant reports reveal if you are likely to meet or exceed sales goals. Perhaps even more importantly, CRM sales forecasts tell businesses if they are likely to fall short of sales goals, giving businesses the time and insights to pivot their strategy to get back on track before it’s too late.