Michael Stearns – Growth Leader at Ascend Digital Agency Ascend Digital Agency
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CRMs, or customer relationship management platforms, can have a huge impact when used correctly. However, they’re only as good as the data you plug into them, meaning it’s imperative that everything from the first customer contacts to descriptions of all communications is recorded.
By implementing the use of a CRM in your company, you can better understand your customer base and increase your conversion rate.
Accessibility of information
When a customer contacts a team member to inquire about their account, with well-documented information in a CRM, all team members can quickly access relevant details about that customer anytime, anywhere. This ensures a seamless customer experience. And from a team management perspective, understanding and tracking your customer’s journey allows you to continuously improve the experiences of both your sales force and your customers.
Converting prospects into customers
Unfortunately, not all prospects are ready to buy after an initial consultation. Entering all meetings and interactions into your CRM in a granular way will not only help you quickly identify which prospects you have in the pipeline, but it will also make it easy to review a strategy to convert them into a customer.
I once met a potential client five times in a six-month period before moving on. Because I carefully documented every interaction over that extended period of time, I always knew exactly what we had discussed earlier and that helped me better position our customer service in the next meeting.
Coaching options
Some salespeople close prospects at a higher percentage than others. If you have a sales rep who is struggling, you can quickly identify things like phone calls made, appointments made, appointments kept, and contracts signed for a period of time so you can tell a story about where there is room for improvement. You should also allow your sales team to run the reports themselves and view these KPIs. Being consistently aware of where they are relative to their target can have a positive effect on production.
Customer Lifecycle and Automations
Our customers are seeing a huge increase in positive reviews due to automation linked to various customer lifecycle milestones in their CRM.
For example, my team and I worked with a roofer who received only 40 ratings during his first three years in business. He doubled his ratings over a six-month period. How? People are likely to leave a review immediately after a positive experience, so one of the milestones in the contractor’s CRM is “Build Complete”, meaning the new roof has been installed. When the customer’s account is moved to this stage, an email containing a Google review link is automatically sent to the customer. Without the CRM, this automation could not exist.
Attribution and reporting
Being able to understand what works—and just as importantly, what doesn’t—work for your business is critical to working lean and maximizing profitability. If you can quickly identify your total customer base, associated revenue and profit margins at the end of the year, and understand the channels that led those customers to your business, you can confidently adjust your efforts for the following year.
For example, during this process, if you realize that 50% of your customers came through Google and 50% of your customers came through Facebook, you might want to delve into what was invested in each platform to understand your true cost to a customer. acquire. And if you dig deeper, if you discover that you had to invest in Facebook 3x what you did with Google, that would be an opportunity to allocate marketing dollars to a platform that performs better for your business. Lower cost per customer acquisition equates to greater profitability for the business.
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