Have you been struggling with efficiency or productivity in your business lately?
Is there a communication breakdown between your departments?
What's your customer feedback like? Are you receiving more complaints or poor responses in Customer Surveys? Any missed sales opportunities?
If you answered ‘yes’ to one or more of the above questions, then I suppose it’s time you took a hard look at your business systems and processes.
And specifically if you’re running manual processes like; spreadsheets and bouncing emails across departments - it's robbing your teams’ precious time, not to mention the hiccups generated in the workflow with repetitive tasks and accountability voids.
Whether you’re a B2B company looking to track leads and customers through long sales cycles, or a B2C company looking for a centrally located system that keeps track of all customers’ conversations and gauges your sales team’s productivity – Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software can play a key role in meeting these challenges and optimising your team’s time and effort.
CRM or Customer Relationship Management is software that stores every detail about the customers or prospects, and tracks every interaction you have with them, including emails, phone calls, voicemails, sales and every other touchpoint your brand or your teams come across – at a one centralised place.
The following are some statistics worth sharing, explaining how CRM software has impacted businesses globally:
- 65% of businesses adopt a CRM within their first 5 years.
- 53% of top-performing companies are investing in CRM to drive sales productivity.
- 80% of marketing automation users saw their number of leads increase, and 77% saw the number of conversions increase.
- A forecast from Gartner anticipates that the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) market will be worth $37 billion in 2017.
Now these stats do paint a pretty picture for CRM, but let's find out how CRM Software can transform your business in this digital age:
1. A Sales Rep’s haven – Increased Customer Visibility!
Being a centralised hub for storing data, a CRM system provides a complete record of every interaction history of sales reps, with new prospects or with existing customers.
This significantly cuts down the precious time used up in the absence of CRM, generally taken to browse through inbox or call history to find a prospect’s number, or say recall the last conversation that took place regarding a new product.
With CRM, a Salesperson never has to worry about reconstructing a timeline of touchpoints with prospects, as they can simply get the entire picture, with a single click and never have to risk missing a touchpoint and annoy the prospects by sending the same email a number of times.
CRM offers a clear view of the sales pipeline, so the reps understand exactly where they stand and can plan for their next set of actions. And not just for the sales team, a robust CRM can also feed valuable information across all departments. It's a valuable tool that increases communication across the organisation and gives a perspective for on the ‘Sales state of affairs’ for every team which only requires a quick login into the CRM dashboard.
2. Helps Standardise and Automate Processes
Sales teams not working under a CRM platform have the tendency to track activities and prospects interaction in different ways of their own – this makes it difficult for the team and managers to consolidate the data and build a coherent picture.
CRM brings uniformity with the ‘data entry’, and standardises the tracking processes, ensuring Sales/Marketing teams, managers or anyone from the organisation can easily extrapolate and assess the data and processes to understand the overall health of Sales at any given point in time.
The system also works to reduce the amount of data entry that a sales rep needs to log in regularly, through synching and auto-population features. This frees up time for the reps who would otherwise be spending hours typing, copying and pasting, rather than doing the actual work of ‘selling’.
With CRM in place, it helps create automated and repeatable processes, so the sales people can move fast with their prospects and customers through the sales cycle, without losing valuable time with unnecessary administrative work.
3. Supports Complex Workflows and Sustainability for Growth
The modern digital landscape is consistently evolving with changing consumer behaviours and a multitude of communication channels.
When the brand is faced to interact and serve the customers through various communication touchpoints such as; emails, websites, phone calls, social media and others; companies require comprehensive and cohesive systems, which can accommodate complex workflows generated via every customer interaction and communication strings within these channels.
A strong CRM software can help support such complex workflows of fast-growing sales teams. It helps to establish the ‘connect’ between Sales and Marketing Teams, as it's now quite obvious that Sales and Marketing teams cannot work in Silos – CRM helps to build this cohesive force to sustain the growth of a company and effectively aligns the purpose of ‘Sales being the delivery mechanism for any marketing message.’
Finally…
Companies of today face a highly competitive business landscape. A powerful sales force armed with a robust CRM tool can assist you to stand out from the crowd, and deliver the personalised and meaningful communication and services that are now being sought by our increasingly sophisticated prospects and customers.
If you'd like more assistance with your sales/lead generaton or would like to discuss anything covered today, we'd love to hear from you.
Call Andy Fox (me) on (03) 5249 5570 or email andy@element7digital.com.au
Our Website is element7digital.com.au
