IMPORTANCE OF CRM IN SALES AND MARKETING 2022

The Internet, AI capabilities and new technologies have created tremendous impact on businesses today. Everything being moved from physical to digital, companies have to pioneer the digital world to leapfrog their competitors. Why do you have to be old school in connecting with your customers and clients?  Do you want to know an effective way? CRM is much more than technology. No technology, no matter how sophisticated, will fail if it is implemented without a proper strategy. Technology and strategy must go hand in hand to bring about a customer centric approach.

If you are interested to read more about what CRM is ? This guide is for you!

Why is CRM important for your Business?

Today’s CRM is not just CRM. It is more than a CRM. CRM is an integrated platform with cloud-suite applications that suits your business needs and strategize your decisions.”You name it – CRM has it all” 

The CRM puts customers first. A CRM software brings together all the information across different departments to bring about a holistic customer centric view. This helps the customer facing employees in marketing, sales, customer service & support to make prompt decisions in every action they take.

There are zillions of products and services available in the market today. The customers are quite picky and customer loyalty is a thing of the past. New products are introduced and it takes only a few days for the product or the service to become a commodity. People switch vendors more easily nowadays.

Each customer has different needs and wants. Not all customers are equal. Some customers expect superior customer service. Some others expect value for their money and many others want products with improvised features. In cases like this, CRM helps the sales and marketing team to prioritize their efforts and deliver to different customer segments.

What is the role of CRM in sales?

1. Lead Management:

CRM software streamlines and automates the lead demographic data and makes sure that the valuable prospects are taken care of. With CRM lead management, you can identify your leads, build a lead scoring system wherein you can assign points based on the source, industry, buying stage and revenue potential. You can create a lead nurturing system for each of the potential leads. Later assign those leads to the sales team which are ready for the sales pitch. CRM lets you identify the lead, qualify the lead, evaluate the conversion rate and check for bottlenecks.

2. Time Management:

CRM helps the sales team save a lot of time by optimizing the daily activities and prioritizing the tasks to make sure that the contacts and key prospects are not ignored. Hence the Sales team can spend time with the customers more, which helps in closing more deals and builds a strong customer base.

3. Targeted Cross-selling and Up-selling:

With the help of CRM, we can gather data and create customer segmentation databases. Also, based on the existing customer database we can create buyer personas to predict the customer behavior. CRM helps you in better understanding the customer requirements, which in turn helps in targeted cross-selling and up-selling campaigns.

4. Enhanced Quota Tracking:

Managers need to know whether the sales quota has been achieved yet or not. The sales CRM system lets the sales managers monitor the quotas and check for quota attainment in a much more enhanced fashion. The sales team can respond to data in real time and take appropriate action. With information readily available for the sales team, the haphazards are reduced significantly.

5. Tracking and analysis of sales activity:

The sales module in CRM showcases the sales pipeline and sales funnel, which tells you which move you should probably make next. Sales funnel helps analyze the sales stages, helping you prioritize your sales activities accordingly. With a sales pipeline, you can track the sales team performance and how close they are in achieving the quotas. With effective analysis and tracking of sales stages, CRM solution lets you drive more sales and skyrockets the company’s revenue.

6. Reduced Admin Work:

CRM reduces admin tasks to a greater extent for the sales teams. Hence the sales team can save a lot of time by not doing repetitive tasks and can solely concentrate on closing deals and pursuing more leads. 

7. Creates Sales Sustainability:

CRM acts as a centralized knowledge database, where all the documents and the sales process stages are stored. Everyone in your sales team can completely rely on this database, even if your sales manager is going to leave the organization. CRM software creates a sustainable sales infrastructure for your business. Things go smoothly no matter what happens or who leaves the organization.

What is the role of CRM in Marketing?

1. Targeted Marketing:

You’ll need a unique strategy when selling to different customers with different needs. CRM lets you create a customer segmentation based on region, the lead source, requirements and how they respond to campaigns.,etc. With proper segmentation data, you can send tailor made campaigns that fit your audience. CRM helps you prioritize your follow ups, personalize campaigns and group records easily using tags.

2. Smart Webforms:

The best marketing campaigns provide quality leads to the sales team. With CRM you can create pre-built smart webforms without writing a single code. CRM lets you engage with the high intent website visitors and once the visitors submit the information in your site, you can send automated replies to them. This way you can automate the lead generation and assign those leads to the sales team.

3. Analyse Campaign performance:

Marketing attrition in CRM helps identify which campaigns have contributed the most in the pipeline. This lets you spend your marketing dollars on the campaigns that show good performance to grow your ROI significantly.CRM ties your marketing and sales data together, presenting you one powerful platform to track the entire history of your conversion process.

4. Google Ad performance:

CRM combines google ads with your sales data, so as to figure out which ad, keyword or which campaign are helping you generate the most leads. CRM even points out which particular keyword or GoogleAd bought in the lead. When you come to know why a specific lead came to your website, you can approach them with the right sales pitch. With CRM , you can make every pitch perfect enough by evaluating the campaign information in your Customer records.

5. E-mail Analytics:

You need to put a full stop to cold calls and generic Email messages that never convert. CRM with email marketing tools lets you send email campaigns and measure the basic email marketing analytics such as open & close rate and clicks on call-to-action. With effective email marketing tools integrated in CRM you can refer to the deals from each campaign and can figure out which Email campaign worked best.

6. Social CRM:

The marketing department keeps publishing tweets, facebook & instagram posts, youtube videos and much more. But what happens if there is no engagement? That’s where social CRM comes in. The social CRM showcases all the information in one place. You can track the traffic and conversions from social media, the total number of followers,lets you segment the audience into follower types. Social CRM helps marketers increase the reach, cut down costs while improving customer engagement and performance measurement.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Your sales and marketing teams can now work in unison. They can use the resources across the platform. With all practical information about their leads, the engagement, the campaign performance, the sales pipelines – your sales and marketing teams can pitch the work perfectly. All the leads generated by the marketing teams are nurtured and it is ready to be sent to the sales team. Your marketing team has access to sales related data, which helps to create targeted campaigns.

CRM is important for your business only if you want to improve your business, grow your sales, outperform your rivals and to build a strong customer base. If these things are not a concern to you, you wouldn’t be reading this now. You can leverage the benefits of CRM only if you don’t treat it as a standalone solution. Doing so, CRM will lack its synergy in delivering the measurable results.