An effective CRM is the key to growing your business! Whether you're a small company with a dozen or so employees, or a multinational with operations in every corner of the globe, there's no doubt that an effective CRM will take your business to the next level.
Here's a look at some of the things that change when a company starts using a CRM:
Significant increase in sales.
Improved customer satisfaction.
360° view for better sales forecasts.
Increased lead conversion rate.
What is CRM?
CRM, or Custom Relations Management, refers to software that centralizes all customer interactions on a single platform (details of customer information, sales progress, history of exchanges and appointments, etc.). Salesforce, HubSpot, Dynamics, Zoho and other products are examples of CRM systems.
However, beyond centralizing all existing information, what else can a CRM do? Here are a few examples:
Manage and maintain relationships with prospects.
Provide marketing departments with useful information on customer demographics and behaviors.
Automate business process tasks.
Manage the sales pipeline with great precision
We hope that after these few lines describing the ability to develop a company's sales and operational capabilities, you're beginning to glimpse the potential gains promised by the use of a CRM. Now let's get down to the nitty-gritty, so as not to leave anything to chance.
1. A CRM enables a personalized customer experience.
The whole point of a CRM is to be able to personalize your customers' experience through judicious touch points, such as targeted promotions, sending an explanatory video or asking for further explanations, in good time and with minimum effort.
Today's customers are much more demanding than ten years ago. In fact, 71% of customers expect services to be personalized at all times, while 76% of consumers feel frustrated when they don't see it (Source: McKinsey).
Thus, personalizing a service according to customers' wishes can take the following forms:
Getting to where they are.
Knowing their tastes.
Offer something that exists only for them.
To hear from them.
Starting from the following premise, we can immediately highlight some of the many CRM functionalities that can meet these criteria:
Sending tips based on customer habits.
Providing relevant product/service recommendations.
Sending key information at specific times (e.g., dashboards).
Efficient, personalized after-sales service
Customer relationship management is a real game-changer when it comes to personalized service. Here are the benefits of CRM that will help you develop your business from a long-term service personalization perspective:
Centralized data collection and AI-driven analysis: The data you collect directly through surveys, forms and other engagement channels is then fed into your CRM, where it is meaningfully processed, analyzed and structured to provide more insight into your customers' unexplored and ever-changing circumstances.
Tracking the buying journey: A CRM can help detect and analyze what a potential customer is looking for on a website, and at what stage of the buying process they are. For example, if he's interested in prices, a CRM will automatically suggest or send him an invitation to make an appointment with a salesperson to discuss your service or product in detail.
These two advantages of CRM enable you to adjust your marketing strategy. They also make it easier to know what to focus on and where to start when looking for new opportunities.
2. CRMs help to improve employees productivity, resulting in many more working hours every year.
Another reason to use a CRM to help your business grow is to use a CRM system that offers both desktop and mobile/tablet solutions. A mobile CRM allows your salespeople, managers and customer representatives to save 240 extra hours of work, and always have the same context and information available on multiple devices.
It's worth noting that companies whose salespeople use a mobile CRM reach their sales quotas much more easily than salespeople who don't use a mobile CRM.
A CRM is cloud-based, so it can work just as well as a desktop solution as a mobile one, in either case the user will have access to all his data on different wired or wireless devices.
For example, a sales representative can leave for an appointment with all his customer data on his cell phone, so he can consult it right up to the last minute:
The customer's communication history.
The customer's most recent purchases.
Or all the notes taken during their last meetings.
Having this kind of data at your fingertips, while away from the company premises, is a real asset when it comes to closing a sale successfully.
3. CRM helps increase customer satisfaction.
Some customers confide that they don't feel they're communicating with one and the same company, but rather with different departments. This inevitably leads to a much reduced sense of closeness with the company in question.
Worse still, poor cooperation between departments due to too great a gap in internal communication can have disastrous effects on customer support. Certain steps are repeated several times, with the customer being asked to explain and then re-explain an element to different departments. In the case of CRM, the centralization and sharing of information are at the heart of the process, so these kinds of concerns are often absent.
A CRM will therefore have the ability to reinforce the sense of unity within its departments, so that the customer sees them as a fluid, global entity, rather than a collection of separate departments.
An added benefit is that this technology helps your company create a stronger engagement between your customer and its various digital touchpoints, such as:
Salespeople.
Customer service agents.
Or marketing campaigns.
Such a connection between the company and the customer leads to better follow-up and support, a better understanding of the customer's needs, and a more personalized service.
4. CRM greatly improves forecasting accuracy by visualizing key performance indicators (KPIs).
One of the greatest benefits of CRM in terms of business growth is its ability to visualize your organization's activities. Indeed, by gathering granular information into well-thought-out dashboards, CRM offers constant data visibility.
Having all your data at your fingertips will help you analyze certain customer behaviors and predict outcomes such as subscription or purchase cancellations.
Charts and graphs tell a story about the data in the system, such as:
The number of current prospects.
Their demographics.
Key marketing performance indicators.
ROI reports.
Etc.
In systems other than CRM, most of the time, such data would have no visual enhancement, they'd just look like a bunch of numbers. Describing information visually, and in a way that can be updated in real time, is a godsend for decision-makers. For example, a Salesforce dashboard can show very precise graphs of sales by department, by year, by sector, by employee, or whatever, very clearly and on a single page. Outside of CRM, such a wealth of information would quickly become unreadable.
But don't forget that your records need to be well organized and clean. So make sure your data sets have been properly migrated to the new system beforehand. Of course, the data is only valid if it is properly recorded in the CRM by everyone in the company. (After all, CRM can't do everything for employees - at least not yet).
5. CRM helps automate the process, thus reducing manual work = Invoice writing.
Process automation is another considerable advantage in the fight against the redundancy of certain energy-consuming, low-value-added tasks. For example, according to a study by CSO Insights, salespeople spend only 25% to 30% of their time selling. The rest is spent on administrative tasks such as prospect qualification, sales forecasts, or other types of ongoing file management.
The importance of CRM software in this respect is that it enables salespeople to concentrate on what they do best. Here are some thoughts on why you need CRM automation for your business:
Rather than having to manually trigger certain emails, AI-powered analytics suggest the ideal time for certain actions, and then you can automate them. You'll no longer have to worry about certain elements relating to the smooth running of your structure, which can prove to be a real headache.
For even greater precision, a CRM system can automate administrative tasks and eliminate the need for micromanagement, as all tasks are routed to the right people in the various departments.
To conclude with this fifth part, remember the essentials. With powerful analytics and task automation, you can grow your business and improve its performance, increasing the productivity of your time and money.
In conclusion!
As you can see, a CRM system can help increase employee productivity, inter-departmental connectivity and forecasting accuracy, giving you extra scope to grow your business.
Now that you know why you should use a CRM, the main question is which CRM system you need. There are several options open to you:
The solution we're highlighting, of course, is Salesforce CRM, for which we're a partner. Salesforce is suitable for all sectors, from e-commerce to fintech. If you're new to the world of CRM, it's worth taking a look at Salesforce's quick-start offers. The idea is to offer a set of cost-effective services that provide the fundamentals of a proper implementation, such as data migration, light configuration and training.
To get the most out of a CRM system, you can call on a large-scale implementation partner, which means your new system will be tailored to your most demanding needs, your team will be trained, and your data will be migrated and properly cleansed. That's where Cloud Ambiance comes in. As a Salesforce partner, we'll be there to support you throughout the CRM implementation process. Our team of multi-certified Salesforce experts will work with you to build the best possible solution for your business! To conclude, we'd like to share one last quick tip with you: choosing the right CRM is the first step, but the second step, and not the least important, is choosing the right team to implement it. Salesforce is a wonderful piece of software, but if you don't get it right, it won't deliver the results you're looking for. Choose your project partner carefully. The consultants who will carry out this mission will have an integral place in your company, joining your teams and becoming part of your working environment.
