Are you looking to better understand CRM and how it can benefit your business? CRM, or customer relationship management, is a system that helps businesses manage customer interactions and data. When used correctly, a CRM can help businesses improve sales, productivity, and customer satisfaction. In this blog post, we’ll cover everything you need to know about a CRM so that you can make the best decision for your business. Read on to learn more!
Content:
- Introduction
- What is CRM and why do businesses need it?
- The benefits of a CRM
- How to choose the right CRM software for your business
- Implementing a CRM into your business
- Measuring the success of your CRM system
- Conclusion
We at Four Drunk Parrots we can help you to choose and setup the right CRM tool for you. We would love to have a chat with you and get to know your business. Contact us today to discuss how we can use better marketing to get you better results. You can also book a free initial meeting with our CMO, Sonja Ceri. She is a wizard when it comes to all marketing.
Introduction
A CRM sits at the heart of your marketing efforts, and it builds the foundation for you to understand, interact and nurture your customers and prospects. With the right CRM tool, you can scale your business when it is growing without needing to change to another tool. It is crucial for your success that you choose the best CRM to fit your needs and goals. In this post we have also compared some of the most popular CRM options our clients are using. We hope that this makes it easier for you to evaluate and decide the best suited system.
What is CRM and why do businesses need it?
A CRM, or customer relationship management, can be seen in three different ways.
- A system
- A practice
- A database
Most companies refer often to the system or software used to manage customer relationships and data.
A Customer Relationship Management System (CRMS) can be defined as an electronic database that stores data about customers and their interactions with your company. It is an intersection for sales and marketing.
CRM is an essential tool for modern businesses. A successful CRM strategy allows companies to collect, store and retain information about their customers and prospects, enabling them to better understand how to nurture customer relationships. It also helps to automate functions such as filing contact information, logging sales activity or identifying key accounts. By incorporating a CRM into your marketing strategy, businesses are able to not only track current customer interactions but also anticipate prospects’ needs and provide personalised responses accordingly.
For instance, using a CRM system can analyse data to provide valuable insight into what kinds of customers are most inclined towards certain products or services and help businesses adjust their offerings. In today’s digital age, having a comprehensive understanding of customer relationships is key to staying ahead of the competition and businesses. If you want your business to succeed for the long term, it is essential to invest into the right CRM tool. It will help your business build meaningful relationships with customers at any scale. A CRM plays an indispensable role to grow and succeed.
The benefits of a CRM?
CRM can be a powerful tool to help businesses grow and streamline their processes. A good CRM system helps to manage your contacts, automates lead nurturing or sales processes, and provides an interactive sales pipeline that can increase a business’ efficiency. The CRM tool allows both divisions, sales and marketing, to collaborate on customer success and support each other’s activities.
It also includes opportunity management, extensive reporting, analysis and forecasting abilities, and even integrations with other software solutions such as surveys, your online shops, call tracking, websites and many more. When used correctly, a CRM can be a very powerful instrument for organisations looking to maximise success. By tracking customer data, optimising workflow processes, maintaining personal contacts, and taking advantage of forecasting tools, an effective CRM solution can provide the foundation of long-term growth in any organisation. With these benefits in mind, it’s easy to see why so many businesses have implemented a CRM in recent years.
Furthermore a CRM is to improve or strengthen the relationship a business has with its customers, and to nurture prospects to become sales qualified. Every process can be automated and streamlined as much as you like.
Just one positive touchpoint with a brand isn’t enough nowadays. The market is saturated with services and products and your competition can gain market share quickly. The initial connection you have made needs to be nourished to stay connected. With a CRM, this can be achieved on a personal level and businesses can provide direct support, increasing the chance of customers becoming loyal to you. So let’s be clear, this is a win-win situation.
How to choose the right CRM software for your business
As any business owner knows, CRM software can have a dramatic effect on the success of a company. With the right software, businesses can increase their efficiency while optimising sales and marketing efforts. But choosing the right CRM software for your business size, budget, and goals can be a daunting task. To ensure you choose the optimal program and make the most of its features, it’s important to take some aspects into consideration.
Before making a decision, first identify your goals and make a plan—decide what kind of information you’d like to store and how you will most likely use this data. Additionally, consider the size of your organisation and your budget when researching solutions; different CRMs are suited for different sized organisations, and not all solutions come with an affordable price tag. Finally, explore integrations available with different solutions; those supporting plug-ins for other apps might best serve your needs in terms of functionality. By taking the time to thoughtfully evaluate the options available before purchasing a product, you’ll greatly increase your chances of choosing the best CRM software for your business.
Nowadays, there are many big and small players on the market, which can make it hard to choose the right CRM system for your company. We understand that it can be overwhelming sometimes. You shouldn’t invest the time, energy and money in a system that would only serve you for a short time. Most CRM tools are easy to start with, but once your business grows it is either hard to scale with them or it gets expensive quite quickly. To avoid a quick disappointment or even the need to move into a completely new CRM system, make sure you are doing your research and you are using the free trial period as much as you can (that’s of course if the CRM is offering a free trial).
Furthermore, you need to think about your ecosystem and which tools, plugins and integrations you are using. It’s best to actually bring this to paper and write down what systems you are currently using, and where you want to grow in the next few years. This is where a marketing strategy comes in handy. Make sure you understand the way the business could grow and what you want the CRM to do. For example, would you like to send surveys, start an online shop or offer an online event. There is much to consider before choosing your CRM. You want to make sure that most, if not all of the integrations you are going to use are natively integrating with your CRM. Bearing this in mind, it is easier further down the track to create your company’s own digital ecosystem.
In our CRM tool comparison chart we have done an overview with the most popular CRMs our clients are using. We hope that it offers you some help to start your CRM journey.
Need a hand with your CRM set up? Not sure how to put together an effective implementation plan? At 4DP we’re here to help you! Contact us today to find out how we can help you get better results.
Implementing a CRM into your business
A CRM can be a great way to streamline processes and increase efficiencies in your business. However, successful implementation takes time and effort, so set realistic and actionable goals before starting. Defining your priorities to get things rolling is the best way to jump start your journey. Research the available options and gather all the necessary information from both industry experts as well as peers to ensure that you have made an informed decision. Leverage all hands on deck for this project and assign a dedicated person or team that will work exclusively on CRM set-up.
Once you have selected a platform and set up a plan, make sure you train your entire team about how to use it. Segmentation of contacts, migrating and integrating data into one system, testing the systems properly are all important steps in the CRM set-up process. Create customised templates for managing communication with customers, interlink CRM systems with other tools, and make sure that it is integrated into all components of your marketing efforts. This will enable a 360° overview of your customer’s journey across channels throughout their lifecycle.
All along the set-up it is wise to track processes and successes to continuously bring changes as required. Finally, celebrate your small successes step by step in order to build momentum for big rewards at a later stage!
Measuring the success of your CRM system
With customer relationship management systems, sales teams are able to quickly identify sales opportunities, streamline sales processes, and produce customer engagement data that helps inspire more sales-driven decisions. But how do you measure the success of your CRM system?
By monitoring sales team performance, sales pipeline progress and contact engagement score, a CRMS can provide real time dashboards to track key metrics like open rates, click rates, calls and any other criteria tailored to measure success. Tracking the metrics around campaign success is vitally important. Things like contact growth, increased sales conversions, website visits or views per contact etc. can be monitored as well to ensure that sales and marketing are in alignment with each other.
Ultimately, this will help you determine if your CRM system is performing as expected or not. So take stock of how well your CRM system is helping guide decisions that increase sales performance. You may find a result you didn’t even anticipate! It’s all part of a sound business strategy for successful companies in the 21st century.
Conclusion
CRM is an important part of any business. It’s not only necessary for recording customer data, but it can also help with marketing and sales efforts. By understanding the benefits of CRM, you can choose the right software for your needs and start seeing improvements in your bottom line. We recommend implementing a CRM as soon as possible to get the most out of this valuable business tool. And don’t forget to measure the success of your CRM system regularly! Contact us today to discuss how we can use better marketing to get you better results.