CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. The fundamental objective of CRM is to enhance business relationships. It enables businesses to stay connected with their clients, streamline all the procedures, and boost profits.
A CRM is designed for increasing revenues and profitability, reduce costs, enhance customer experience, and customer loyalty. It enhances the quality of customer communication and responsiveness and also enables the clients to interact with employees.
CRM is considered to make life simpler and in a perfect world means order, access to information, team planning, and better management. Though, it’s not rare to see companies using CRM still encountering problems with having all the information structured in one place and communicating appropriately with the team.
The benefits of using a CRM:
There are four main advantages to using CRM.
1) Better customer experience
When you know a lot about your prospect, It’s much simpler to deliver a positive buying experience.
2) Higher productivity
You can automate tasks like call and activity logging, reporting, deal creation, and more with a CRM. The fewer time reps are spending on administrative work, the greater number of hours they have to get in front of prospects. Your revenue will improve proportionally.
3) Increased collaboration
A sales manager can immediately see how and when her salespeople are reaching out to and following up with buyers. An account executive (AE) can rapidly fill himself in on an opportunity his sales development rep (SDR) has prospected and qualified for him.
Salespeople on the same team can learn more about each other’s best practices and pinch-hit for each other whenever someone goes on vacation or gets sick. Essentially, CRM increases rep collaboration and efficiency.
4) Greater insights
Avoid wondering how your salespeople are performing. A CRM will give you both a high-level and on-the-ground picture of rep performance, including team-wide and individual conversion rates by deal stage, average deal size, deal velocity — and that’s just scratching the surface. Imagine what you could do with this data-backed understanding of what’s working and what could be enhanced.
How to Use a CRM
Step 1: Add your salespeople:
The very first and important step in a CRM implementation should be adding users. But always make sure you’ve clarified the significance of a CRM, especially, how it will enable your salespeople to bring in more business. Adoption will be extremely low If reps aren’t sold on the CRM.
The sooner you can get all the reps on your team using your CRM, the more comprehensive and precise your data will be.
Step 2: Customize your settings
Your sales process should be reflected in your CRM. This implies it accurately maps to the steps a client goes through from “lead,” to “opportunity,” to “customer.”
Let’s suppose your sales process is divided into “Connect,” “Qualify,” “Demo,” and “Close.” Create deal steps in your CRM pipeline for each one. Now, you’ve formalized the sales process for your reps.
Next, create custom properties for storing your data. Your CRM will have default “properties” or fill-in-the-blank details about your prospect.
A maximum number of businesses have different properties they want to track. To give you an idea, maybe you want to add a field for “Billing ID,” “Time zone,” “Product purchased,” or “Global office address.” Create those custom properties now before you import any existing data to your CRM.
Step 3: Import your contact, companies, and deals
Possibilities are, you’re presently using a distinct CRM or spreadsheets to keep track of your prospects and opportunities.
Approximately every CRM will let you bring in this information by uploading a CSV file. Each column in your spreadsheet should match a contact property in the CRM, so your data will flow seamlessly between your old and new systems.
Step 4: Integrate your other tools
In your CRM, Marketing, sales, and customer success information should be centralized. This provides you a 360-view of your prospects and customers and cuts down on manual data entry.
Step 5: Set up your dashboard
Select which statistics appear on your dashboard based on your sales objectives and process. You should have a crystal-clear overview of your team’s performance so you can keep them aligned and give the right coaching and direction. That is the reason why a CRM dashboard is so handy: It’s like a control panel that you can customize to fit your specific needs.
Step 6: Enable reports
Being a sales manager, you’re spending a lot of time looking at data. However, your reps should be spending as much time as possible selling. That’s why it’s an incredible idea to create daily, weekly, monthly, and/or quarterly email reports.
How Can CRM Help Your Business?
• CRM can help you in categorizing and identifying
Leads.
• CRM cab boost referrals from your existing clients.
• CRM can help you in providing reasonable & personalized customer support.
• It may also help you in Improvising your products & services by taking relevant feedback.
• It will make Collaboration easy between your Sales, Marketing & Support Teams by centralizing data.
Conclusion
For any business organization, implementing a CRM system is a serious challenge, because it brings about changes that are happening on all levels and involve every employee.
So, today without the aid of a CRM solution, no business can survive. The key to success is putting the customer at the heart of your business strategy and a CRM solution enables you to do just that.
If you think your company is too small for CRM, think again. It would surely rise and adopting a CRM system after that may take a little bit of time for you and your faculty to get convinced with it. So, instead of taking things as they come, be prepared for the future. Anybody can handily get caught up between CRM and which one fits their needs, so to save your time, you should always take consultation from experts.