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The Business Case for Devoting Resources to CRM Management

In today’s competitive business landscape, managing customer relationships is paramount to sustained success. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems have emerged as powerful tools to streamline processes, enhance customer satisfaction, and drive revenue growth. In this blog post, we will delve into the compelling business case for allocating resources to CRM management. From improved customer retention to enhanced productivity, let’s explore the tangible benefits that a well-managed CRM can bring to your organization.

  1. Boost Customer Retention: Effective CRM management enables businesses to cultivate stronger relationships with customers. By capturing and analyzing customer data, you can gain valuable insights into their preferences, needs, and behaviors. This knowledge empowers you to personalize interactions, address concerns promptly, and provide tailored solutions, ultimately fostering customer loyalty and reducing churn.
  2. Drive Revenue Growth: A well-organized CRM system allows businesses to identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities, enabling targeted marketing and sales efforts. By leveraging customer data, you can segment your customer base, identify high-value prospects, and design personalized marketing campaigns that increase conversion rates and drive revenue growth.
  3. Enhance Customer Satisfaction: CRM systems facilitate seamless communication and collaboration across departments, ensuring a consistent customer experience. With access to customer data, sales representatives, customer support teams, and other stakeholders can understand a customer’s history, preferences, and past interactions, enabling them to provide personalized and efficient service. Improved customer satisfaction leads to higher customer retention, positive word-of-mouth, and enhanced brand reputation.
  4. Streamline Business Processes: A comprehensive CRM system centralizes customer data, eliminating the need for manual data entry and disparate spreadsheets. By automating routine tasks such as data entry, lead nurturing, and follow-up reminders, businesses can free up valuable time for employees to focus on more strategic activities. This streamlining of processes enhances productivity, reduces errors, and improves overall operational efficiency.
  5. Enable Data-Driven Decision Making: A well-managed CRM system serves as a centralized repository of customer data, providing valuable insights into customer behaviors, market trends, and sales performance. Access to real-time and accurate data enables informed decision making across various business functions. By analyzing customer data, businesses can identify patterns, anticipate market demands, and align their strategies accordingly.
  6. Improve Sales Forecasting and Pipeline Management: CRM systems provide visibility into the sales pipeline, allowing businesses to track leads, opportunities, and sales performance in real-time. Accurate and up-to-date sales data enables more precise sales forecasting, helping businesses make informed decisions regarding resource allocation, budgeting, and goal setting. Additionally, CRM systems facilitate collaboration among sales teams, enabling effective pipeline management and maximizing sales conversion rates.
  7. Facilitate Customer Segmentation and Targeted Marketing: CRM systems enable businesses to segment their customer base based on various criteria such as demographics, purchase history, and preferences. This segmentation allows for targeted marketing campaigns tailored to specific customer segments. By delivering personalized messages, offers, and content, businesses can increase engagement, improve response rates, and drive higher conversions.
  8. Strengthen Internal Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing: CRM systems serve as a centralized hub for customer data, fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing among teams. Sales, marketing, and customer support teams can access a comprehensive view of customer interactions, facilitating seamless handovers, personalized interactions, and streamlined customer service. This collaborative approach ensures a consistent customer experience across all touchpoints.

By prioritizing CRM management and allocating the necessary resources, businesses can unlock their full potential, enhance customer relationships, and drive long-term success.

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Understanding Your Sales Pipeline Using Forecasting Reporting

Being able to determine how your sales pipeline is performing throughout the year can be challenging to understand without clear and simple reporting.

We would like to encourage you to PAUSE for a moment and develop a visual representation of your sales pipeline.

Your pipeline should not only be for the fiscal year but break that bad boy down into quarters or months.

 

Proactive Sales

 

Approaching sales with a proactive approach rather than a reactive approach is where you can use technology.

Integrating technology into your sales process enables you to make real-time adjustments to your sales strategy.

In a favorite CRM software of our is Zoho CRM; where included in the CRM is a module called Forecasts that provides the entire organization performance reporting by individual solicitors and organizational role.

With the selection of the year and quarter (or monthly) you can understand the current deals in the sales pipeline and if they have been funded or the percentage of likelihood that they will be.

This type of reporting allows the entire organization to understand the current status of revenue.

Empowering sales professionals to know not only the current progress to goals but to understand where they need to focus attention and resources to close deals successfully.

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CRM System Management Tips and Trick You Can Use (2019)

Everyone runs their companies technology based on the unique business needs of the company and strategy.  We wanted to offer a few suggestions on common pain points that all CRM Management professionals can use.

Listed below you will find a few tips and trick to support keep these areas maintained.

Modern CRM Design

Now that CRM’s are designed with whole organizational teams accessing the system in mind, the whole process of thinking of the desired list, submitting a request to the database administrator and waiting for that person to go through the often cumbersome process of setting up a query and then exporting that data into a usable report.

Using List Views

Sometimes a change in verbiage reflects a larger shift in functionality and this has certainly been the case in CRM’s now referring to queries as views.

I’ll review how you can look at CRM software views as a tool to support productivity with your salesforce processes.

Even if you try on the two words, you immediately sense the difference.

Queries sound scientific and serious, while views sound expansive and inviting.

It’s a shift from having to mine to extract hard to get at information to simply open the shutters to reveal what is already there in all its potential.

As designers have simplified CRM user interfaces across the board, one of the biggest changes has been the recognition that it shouldn’t take a special skill set to see data organized into subsets and lists.

Thankfully all of the cumbersome steps required in the past are no more!

They have been replaced by simple filters that can yield specific results in seconds within the same window the user is currently accessing.

These list views can then be acted upon immediately, such as sending out a mass email to a particular group, or they can be used to generate reports that can then be automatically updated.

List views can also be saved locally so users can simply click on a drop-down menu to bring up a specific filtered group.

Views are unique to each user, you can keep what is relevant for you in your particular role without cluttering up the system with a mass of views.

In addition, you can switch views between tasks so that you don’t have to pull up a report and consider it alongside what you are trying to do, the view that is most relevant to your task is simply what you choose, see, and work within.

When you are done with the task you just simply revert to the regular view.

All this leads to much more efficiency in executing tasks, running reports, sending email and social campaigns, and organizing your activities.

Want to see a list of all the leads you have not contacted in the last quarter so you can send them a quick email?

Wondering how many proposals are in the closed/won stage so you can use that information for a budget update? Just use views to give you those lists with ease.

Even the actual search criteria options have become both more refined and more broadly responsive to how different users might think to search.

For instance, you could look up all the records that “contain” a particular word within a particular field to generate a list.

The sophistication of queries remains, but with a far more intuitive process.

Queries were one of the great hindering factors in the democratization of the CRM for nontechnical users, isolating a seemingly inaccessible mountain of data and allowing only the most technical of climbers access.

The shift toward powerfully intuitive list views should not be underestimated.

One is that your whole business becomes more open, efficient, and connected because more people are actually using your CRM.

The other is that everyone is then using data to drive the key decisions and actions that empower your sales team and business goals, and that is where the real gain lies.

CRM software makes another leap – enjoy the view!

 

System And Record Coding (Don’t Over Do It)

As we’ve worked with dozens of companies over the years one of the first things I do is take a look at their code tables.

This truly lets me know where the business is and how organized their data is.

Trying to convince yourself that “your business is SPECIAL.”  Like my second in command in my last job used to tell me

“It’s Not Always About You.”

I would love to have a conversation with anyone in business about how much of their work isn’t even supporting their sales and customer journey.

Look at your coding and how you look at the tasks your company is executing.

In some cases, companies have finally let go of work and tasks they have been performing for a year when we put their work under this kind of lens.

If you want to truly measure what your business is doing, you should be asking yourself with each activity you perform in your business “is it in related to”:

Is this one of the listed below:

  • Identification
  • Cultivation
  • Solicitation
  • Stewardship?

Managing And Tracking Data And Report Requests In Your CRM

I recently had the opportunity to stop in on a Facebook Page for CRM users and a new CRM system manager was discussing how she had an immediate report request from her boss and needed a little help.

Well after I provided the answer another user jumped on and discussed how she was making the industry more difficult for other because she did not force the person making the reporting request wait 7 days to deliver it.

I totally understand this person point of view and for a time I believed it myself.

However, as you begin to understand that the world and business do not work that way!

Business and opportunities present themselves at any time and it doesn’t come down to the need to provide structure and time for how you work.

Your right, database managers are very busy and are the superman/women for the office.

There are steps we can take to make handling the normal pace of chaos in our roles with a few proactive approaches that we cover in the video in this blog post.

A true professional in this field takes full responsibility for their role in the company, though most of the time our role is a thankless role we have to think long-term and strategically to support the needs of all areas of the business.

If you’ve been a CRM system manager at any time, you’ve experienced the situation where just a few months earlier you ask leadership if certain data points should be captured and they say “NO”.

Just to come back later and explain they need reporting on that data they asked you not to collect?

Staying organized and not letting data and reporting request slip through the crack has to be a priority when providing information for the company.

Make sure you have a logical systematic process in place for managing those requests to keep the flow of information going.

View the video below to walk through managing data requests in your CRM and how it can make the entire business more productive.

 

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Opportunities Boards – Increase Your Chances of Sales Opportunities Knocking

When sales opportunity knocks, of course, you want to answer the door, but getting the opportunity to come a-knockin’ is always the harder part.

If you haven’t used an Opportunities Board before, this can be a great way to get your arms around all the possible engagement possibilities (sales collatoral) your organization has and centralized them all into one place.

With so many communication channels it’s easy to feel like you are having to look in multiple places to find the engagement tools you need to interface with a particular audience or campaign.

Opportunities Boards create one document for all and become the hub for your available resources and sales engagement opportunities.

We recommend storing this document somewhere in your CRM that your entire staff has access to so they can add resources as they come up or are created.

In many cases within larger organization’s different departments might have resources that staff in other areas are entirely unaware of, so this exercise really is one that sheds light and empowers all.

It is also a great net efficiency gain because instead of looking in the ten places an opportunity might be living, you just have to reference one document that links you to the sources you need for a particular outreach or initiative.

It also means you won’t miss that additional resource that you forgot was even out there.

One other big plus? You will likely realize you have more opportunities to engage leads and prospects than you thought!

 

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How Social Selling Has Become a Lifeline for Every Company

For many companies, social channels have been a nice add-on to sales efforts, but having a social strategy hasn’t quite become the norm as of yet.

However, successful companies are evolving to understand how social has become a lifeline for every company!

Part of the reason is that most CRM’s are not fully integrated with social channels, so engaging with and tracking social involvement has been challenging.

But the time has come people – if your organization isn’t engaging with social, it needs to get a life.

No longer is this kind of outreach superfluous, and with firewalls shutting out more and more email every day these channels are now a vital way to reach your constituents and learn how they feel about your work, follow up a post they make in reference to your brand, or just say thanks for coming to an event.

Modern CRM systems allow you to see your social channels and related activity all in one place using its Social module so you can track activity and respond in real time across all your channels.

You can also filter what social activity you want to track within this module.

For example, perhaps you want to track all your active contacts that might be talking about your organization or all those organizations that you have submitted proposals to.

You can even create a keyword search to track all social activity related to a particular subject matter that might be relevant to your organization.

For example, your organization is supporting particular legislation and you want to see any posts that mention it.

In addition, you can post right to your social accounts and track activity right from your CRM. Integrating your accounts is a breeze.

We hope these get you excited about the brave new role of social media because one thing is for sure, it’s relevance to your organization is becoming a vital lifeline.

Here is a quick video that previews some of the potentials of social working within a CRM:

 

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