Your business has primarily one job; to delight its customers. Anything that makes you a more efficient business owner gives you time and energy for delighting your customers., A CRM does this, and much more.
CRM and Your Business
The C in CRM stands for Customer. Customers, in this sense, are your target audience or leads that have indicated an interest in your goods or services. They are a HUGE part of your business, and they play a major role in determining the success of your company. Undoubtedly, the biggest obstacle to the success of your business is the ability to identify leads and create customers. Finding customers for your business is hard, especially if you do not have a system that supports your business’s customer-related processes. This is what makes a CRM system indispensable for your business
The R in CRM stands for relationships. Relationships represent the bridge between your customer needs and your business’ satisfaction of those needs. The ability to understand what your customer needs are and meet those needs is vital to your company’s continued existence.
The M in CRM stands for management. For your business to run effectively, the relationship between your business and your customers needs to be managed effectively.
Starting and running a business can be quite overwhelming, as there seems to be a million and one things to do. So many departments come together to give your business a solid structure. The most important aspect of your business is sales. That is where the money is, after all. Since sales are always linked to your customers, then your sales department deserves much of your attention. As an entrepreneur, a CRM system makes it easier to manage your customers. It doesn’t matter whether you own a small or large business, with a strong CRM system, you can take care of all your customer-related needs.
In this article, we’ll answer questions like:
- What’s a CRM system?
- How does CRM work?
- How can CRM help me serve my current customers better and reach out to potential ones?
We’ll cover the most important things that you need to know about CRM systems, so think of this article as your beginner’s guide for understanding Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems.
Let’s get started with CRM Systems 101. We wrote this with you in mind, and we know that this solution will help you scale your business. Note that CRM software and CRM systems are used interchangeably in this guide because they both mean the same thing.
What is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System?
In case this is the first time that you’re coming across the term, here’s a simple definition. A CRM System is a business technology that allows a company to track, manage, and analyze all the interactions it has had with its past, present, and potential customers.
A CRM system performs many important functions for your business. It will help you identify prospects, engage potential customers, create new business relationships, retain existing customers, and generate more revenue from customer relationships.
A CRM software is designed to be the most efficient way to engage your customers at every stage of the sales process.
A CRM system can collect data and offers analytics to compile all the information from the company’s communication channels, which includes the email, company’s social media, telephone, customer’s data, company’s website, marketing campaigns, and more (Yes, it’s a lot).
No business can scale without customers buying its products and services consistently. To make this happen, businesses need to retain current customers and constantly fill their sales funnel with new leads. A CRM system is a handy tool to carry out these operations. With it, small and large businesses can learn more about their target audience and how best to cater to their needs., a CRM system can help you grow your business.
Who uses CRM?
Every organization that wants to grow their business requires a CRM system. Every business that needs customers to survive needs a system that can increase its efficiency at converting leads and retaining patrons. If you are reading this, chances are you own one of such ventures, meaning you need a CRM system.
Sales Department
The sales team can use it to keep records of both customers and prospects. For both groups, the team can retain relevant data like their email addresses and phone numbers. But the system can be put to even greater use.
In the case of customers, the sales team has the opportunity to study their buying choices and behaviors. They can then apply these insights in selling, up-selling, or cross-selling products or services.
To handle prospects, the sales team can deploy the CRM system to stay in touch with them. Any information recorded can be used to determine how best to nurture the leads and pull them further down the sales funnel. This sort of organization will ensure that leads are accounted for, and no potential customer slips out of the funnel unnoticed.
The CRM system can also help to keep track of customers’ activity and initiate the appropriate measures per time. For example, the system could notify the sales team that a customer hasn’t ordered in the last two months. The team can then decide to send an email to the customer asking when both parties could discuss future business.
Marketing Department
According to a 2013 study, 74% of consumers get frustrated with websites when content, ads, offers, and promotions are unrelated to their interests. This implies that targeted marketing is more important than ever. As such, marketers need all the help, they can get to ensure they reach the right people with the right message. And a CRM system can offer loads of help in that regard.
Marketers can apply records from customers’ activities and behaviors in designing effective marketing campaigns. There are several ways to approach this. One is to study customers’ interactions with previous marketing materials like emails and social media posts. They can then use recognized patterns of engagement to craft more effective marketing campaigns.
An easy way to ensure marketing collaterals yield results is to create personalized messages. A CRM system can help the marketing team understand trends it can use in crafting user-specific content and offers. These types of materials are more likely to lead to conversions than generic promotions.
By taking insights from the CRM like emails replied, emails opened, and products purchased, marketers can create customer segments. They can then target each segment with personalized marketing materials and content.
Customer Service Department
The quality of your products and services is vital to the success of your business. A CRM system can help your customer service team say and do the right things to your customers.
You can use data from the CRM software to stay in touch with your customers, thereby making them feel needed. What’s more, the system provides an opportunity to keep customers updated with tailored offers and company news.
A closer look at the system’s functionality will also reveal that it could be applied in forging stronger bonds with your customers. Every customer wants to feel special and heard. The CRM system provides the opportunity to discover customers’ preferences and pain points. Such information can then be used to create unique experiences.
Main Features Of An Effective CRM System
CRM software plays a major role in scaling your business. More than ever, small businesses need to manage their customers and improve their experience.
Each business has unique needs, but every business needs to perform these functions to be successful. For a CRM system to improve the sales process in an organization, it should:
- Be easier to use and more efficient than using a spreadsheet
- Have and use AI to find the best leads in a list of thousands of leads
-
Remind the business to carry out each step in:
- selling,
- winning a deal,
- onboarding,
- invoicing, and
- renewing or expanding the revenue from current customers.
The features built into CRM systems that allow them to accomplish the above are:
Lead Management
With this feature, businesses can easily decide the best customers to follow up with regularly. Such leads are mostly determined based on demographic factors. However, certain CRM systems provide the option of creating customer segments based on other factors.
With the Lead management feature, the sales team can be more effective when choosing high-quality leads. It can also save time that would have been spent chasing down cold prospects.
Contact Management
This feature helps you to organize contacts and create personalized experiences for your customers. These two factors are key ingredients of customer satisfaction.
Also, small businesses can collate and group different classes of their audience. With this in mind, businesses can make better marketing decisions when introducing new products to certain customers.
Mobile CRM
Almost everyone has a smartphone in their hands, pockets, or bags. With CRM programs and apps, businesses have access to view live data and receive how many conversions the marketing campaigns have gotten. You can manage business operations and monitor results on the go.
Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is a CRM strategy targeted at selecting and identifying the top customers that are most likely to convert. This CRM feature also analyzes the success your company has with getting high-quality leads.
This helps the sales and marketing teams in speeding up the movement of your leads through the sales funnel.
Sales Analytics
Sales analytics is vital when it comes to making decisions about what campaign steps are to be taken.
It allows you to collect past data from polls, campaigns, website traffic, and social media to analyze for better decisions.
CRM File Storage
Data has to be stored to be useful for future reference. A CRM storage system will provide your business with the ability to get previous and historical data of customers in a short amount of time. CRM software also has to provide strong security and backup to protect data from being damaged or stolen by cybercriminals.
Product Quotes
It functions as an inventory for your business’ products and helps you determine what products are popular among customers and which ones aren’t doing so well. You can get then access this information from several devices, including smartphones, desktops, tablets, and a whole lot more.
Market Automation Integration
Marketing automation is a feature that allows you to target potential audiences that may be interested in the kind of products you sell. And what’s better, it’s done almost automatically. Impressive right? We think so too.
Case Management/Customer Satisfaction
Your business can manage each customer’s profile. With that in mind, you can create a personalized experience for each customer and increase their satisfaction.
It doesn’t stop there. Businesses can ensure that sensitive details about their customers are managed in a secure environment to avoid theft. You can never be too tight with security, especially with customer information.
Campaign Management
A campaign is an organized course of action taken by a business to generate a preferred result. This feature allows all businesses, small and large, to manage all their campaigns on one platform.
How Does CRM Make Businesses Successful?
Every business uses a sales process to generate sales. The more effective the sales process can be implemented, the more successful the business will be. A CRM system is designed to make this sales process highly efficient. Here is how it does that.
Helps Discover New Customers
CRM software is important in sourcing for new customers. A high functional CRM software will do a great job of keeping track of previous customer profiles.
With this data, the CRM software can determine the next set of customers to target. This can increase your chances of getting more conversions.
Enhances Closing Deals
Since the CRM system is effective at choosing the right kind of leads to follow up on, there is a higher chance of getting efficient and quicker responses.
Also, the CRM system is prompt at responding to customers, which builds trust and encourages customers to do business with you.
Better Customer Service
Remember, we established that your company’s success depends largely on how it can manage the relationship with its customers. A CRM system will simplify this task with the many features and data points it provides.
CRM software adds numerous advantages to small businesses and large enterprises. Maintaining the relationship between customers and the business is an obvious benefit.
Enhances Customer Loyalty
CRM plays a major role in enhancing customer loyalty. Keeping customers loyal has become incredibly difficult. This is due to the availability of so many options. But as a business, you can stand out and keep your customers by consistently giving them memorable experiences. The CRM system opens several doors of opportunity to do this. From facilitating personalized experiences to ensuring speedy responses to customers’ queries, the system has all you need to delight your customers.
Increases Referrals
Most small businesses know that happy customers are likely to become repeat customers, and repeat customers bring in new customers. Word-of-mouth marketing is still the best and most powerful form of marketing. If you use your CRM system effectively, it’ll tap into that powerful marketing channel.
How?
The main focus of your CRM system is to satisfy your customers. By helping you understand your customers better, you’ll create a better relationship with them. This way, they are more likely to provide free word-of-mouth marketing for your business.
Better Products and Service
CRM software can gather data and information about how customers feel about your company, and this information will cover your products. The software gives you detailed insights about how your customers feel about the products, the service, and what area you need to improve on.
An Effective CRM: Tapdesk CRM
There are about 200 CRM solutions competing for your attention. What makes any one of these stand out? Here’s an example. Tapdesk CRM was designed based on the premise that finding the right leads is the most crucial aspect of initiating lasting customer relationships. As such, Tapdesk provides the option of conducting a thorough lead search quickly. You can have results containing viable leads in as little as three seconds.
Helping find leads is only one of the many features Tapdesk offers. Others include:
- An all-in-one system for the collation and management of data. There’s no need to switch between platforms. With Tapdesk, all you need to manage customer data is integrated into one system. In addition to this, the platform also provides iron-clad security for data stored on it.
- A user-friendly interface. Tapdesk offers a simple and intuitive interface anyone can interact with. There are no elaborate sign-up procedures that can cost you time and cause hassles. In fact, data importation from other platforms is easy and straightforward.
- A unique range of customization options. Few CRM systems offer the kind of flexibility Tapdesk does. You can tailor the platform’s set-up to your unique business needs, thereby creating an improved experience for yourself.
Looking for a CRM
system for your business?
If you are looking to adopt a CRM system that will tick all the boxes on your checklist, you should consider Tapdesk.
Written by:
Favour Yusuf
CRM Analyst
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