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CRM = Customer Relationship Management. It is designed to help businesses solve challenges with their sales & marketing.
CRM refers to the system a company uses to analyse customer interactions and measure data throughout the customer lifecycle. It should improve business relationships with customers through retention and acquisition.
Think of it as a tool to manage business relationships (with clients, partners and suppliers), projects and strategies. It goes beyond managing your business contacts because it also manages relationships.
It is designed gain insight into the sales performance of your business, so strategies can be adjusted based on trends. It will help your sales team stay on track by setting up automatic workflow rules, so interactions with potential customers aren’t missed.
Whether you’re a small business looking for a place to store and access information across multiple devices and locations or a larger business wanting to manage and improve customer interactions and satisfaction, a CRM will benefit your business.
1 – Organisation
Manage leads, clients & contacts. Record business engagement.
2 – Communication
Schedule automatic reminders & create email templates for leads.
3 – Information
Give your sales team access to vital resources by sharing data.
4 – Lead Generation
Capture website leads in your CRM to quickly follow-up.
5 – Understanding
Schedule weekly emailed reports, to know if goals are being met.
A group of small businesses were asked to identify their biggest challenge regarding sales and marketing. 70% of respondents said engaging, qualifying and following up with leads was their biggest challenge, and 61% said prioritising and tracking tasks for the sales team was a problem.
CRM systems are designed to help businesses solve challenges when it comes to following up with leads and managing your sales team’s priorities. If you’re considering implementing a CRM System but aren’t quite sure if you need one, here are some common problems it can help your business solve:
1 – You feel like you’re drowning in information & can’t keep track of it.
2 – You lose new business due to leads not being well-managed.
3 – You don’t know if the spend on marketing is a good investment.
4 – You waste time trying to find emails from leads and clients.
5 – You miss appointments and don’t follow-through on tasks.
6 – You don’t know if your business is growing and/or how/where.
7 – Your customers have to repeat themselves every time they call.
8 – Your sales team has a different sales process for each person.
9 – You lost a hot lead list when an employee left your company.
10 – There is no consistency in sales emails sent to leads.
11 – Your sales team has no way of prioritising their task list.
12 – You don’t have a way of collaborating easily as a team.
A CRM is part of a suite of software apps your business needs to grow. One of the advantages of a CRM is it’s part of a complete set of apps available to manage your business, including email, marketing campaigns, invoices, and password management.
A CRM helps a business. by allowing them to follow-up on leads, and nurture better customer relationships because all the interactions were accessible in one place. If you answer ‘Yes’ to any of the following three questions, your business will benefit from a CRM:
1 – Are sales being lost because you’re not following-up on leads?
2 – Do you have a sales process and want to manage a pipeline?
3 – Do you want customer and project information in one place?
A CRM should be customisable to meet specific business needs and suitable for B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-customer) organisations. Whether a Sole Trader or small business, you’ll stay organised and efficient.
We have implemented CRM systems for sole traders and small businesses. Each business benefitted from being able to read, edit and save data to a central database via any device. From collaborating on projects to scheduling meetings and reminders, a CRM allows a business to manage hundreds of contacts, projects and leads efficiently. And, because it is cloud-based, the data is backed up and accessible from anywhere. So, if you want to work from home, need urgent access whilst on holiday or want to base yourself somewhere exotic, you can.
Your business may use a system that has sufficed but has been found lacking. Maybe you’ve used Excel to track projects and maintain contact information, or used several different apps for your data. Whatever your process has been, you might be looking for something more advanced.
Gartner found 8 essential areas in creating successful businesses: vision; strategy; collaboration; processes; customer experience; information; metrics; technology.
Once the business vision has been identified, a CRM should form part of the business strategy to help with collaboration, processes, customer experience, information and metrics. A CRM is a part of the software technology needed for a business to operate.
CRM users shared the timing of implementing a CRM system for their business.
If your business processes are working well and you’re wondering why you would need a CRM, here are a few indicators to help you decide when it’s a good time:
1 – You wish you could easily organise & analyse business contacts and projects.
2 – Keeping a record of conversations & scheduling reminders is difficult in Excel.
3 – You have no way of cross-referencing and searching marketing campaigns.
4 – You want to remotely track your sales pipeline, projects and client interactions.
5 – You want to easily find historical emails for your contacts and projects.
6 – You want to link unrelated contacts to projects they are collaborating on.
Using a CRM in the early stages of business growth will help you setup ongoing sales processes, manage customer relationships and close important deals. As your business grows, you’ll have a system in place to track leads, sales, projects, and tasks. A CRM is scalable, meaning a business can easily add new employees to the system to ensure they adopt the standard way of working. This is essential to prevent employees creating their own standalone spreadsheets and workflows (making it impossible to understand and analyse what they are doing and with who).
When implement a CRM?
Yesterday’s gone.
Tomorrow never comes…
Map out the sales process:
Train your staff how to use it:
Workflow automation:
