One of the first steps you should take when building a sales force is implementing a CRM.
According to research, effective use of CRM can increase sales in a company by 30%. This means that a properly selected and properly implemented CRM system is a necessary tool for every developing organization. How can it benefit your company?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an approach that improves communication with potential and existing customers. Till 2025, it is expected to reach revenue of around $80 billion.
Based on customer information gathered in a CRM-type tool, you can make smarter decisions about the offers, messages, and sales channels used. The CRM application allows you to store data, better plan and organize work, as well as strengthen control over the company. This helps to save time associated with performing repetitive activities, improve communication in the organization, customer relationship, and financial performance of the company.
CRM is a great tool
Without a doubt, we can say that implementing a CRM system is one of the ways to improve the performance of your sales department.
According to a study, while implementing the system, 54% of entrepreneurs identified an increase in the number of sales as the main expectation from the integration procedure.
In addition to increasing sales, the use of CRM has a number of advantages. Improving the level of customer service, creating a new system of business processes, increasing the level of customer satisfaction, building a system that will allow not to lose a client even after the sale is made.
The robust CRM system features make it easy to exchange data. It helps in cost reduction, increases the number of applications, excluding applications that did not have time to process and were lost without a trace from the application control process. It also allows you to build trusting and long-term relationships with the client.
The highest priority for users of the CRM system is to achieve the targets. This is exactly where a CRM system can prove its worth.
Despite all these advantages, not all businesses decide to implement a CRM system. Very often, they justify their unwillingness to understand the issue by the fact that they are already satisfied with everything. It is convenient to enter transactions into Excel, opening and closing it a thousand times a day, in order, for example, to see the number of the client you need. There are many objections, but after successful implementation, in most cases, they all come to nothing.
Why should you use CRM software?
Store all customer data in one place
If you haven’t used CRM-class tools yet, then, most likely, information in your company is stored in different formats, in different places, and served by different programs.
Surely, you have repeatedly encountered a problem in order to open a file that your employees saved as .xls, .xlsx, .numbers, or forwarded via Google Drive. Using such disparate data wastes valuable sales team time. Can you work this way? Of course, but on the condition that work efficiency is not important to you.
Because of the implementation of a CRM system, businesses will not have to waste time using several data processing programs. Everything will be collected in one place, and they will be able to collect and update customer data much faster, as well as exchange them with each other. In addition, information organized and collected in one CRM system will allow you to better see the situation in the company.
Improve planning and organization of work
Adequate planning of actions is very important. Everyone who has at least some experience in management knows about it. A lot of planning tools have already been created because even the best memory can fail, and writing everything down in a calendar or notebook is not very convenient.
One of the solutions that sales teams turn to is CRM-class tools. You can schedule phone calls, emails, and meetings with customers, as well as describe how the communication with a particular customer is going.
All actions related to the client are collected in one place into a single whole. With the systematic use of CRM, you do not need to remember when to whom and with what information you need to contact. The system will save you from unnecessary actions, because of which you will have more time for negotiations with clients.
Receive detailed reports
Growth or decline are not the only metrics that reflect the performance of a company. An experienced and professional manager knows what, when, and how to evaluate in the sales process. It is not enough to just capture the metrics – you need to make accurate reports and analyze the data. All this is done by the CRM system, answering many important questions:
- What are the most effective ways to attract customers?
- What have been the best salespeople doing over the last week, month, year, and how can less effective employees emulate them?
- How long does it take to complete the deal?
- At what point in the sales process are the most customers lost?
- Which products were sold as planned and which were less than expected?
- Will the sales plans be realized at the end of the month, quarter, year?
By collecting all the information related to the sales process in the CRM system, you can monitor key performance indicators, analyze trends and plan sales in the company. CRM allows you to unify reports, avoid errors, improve sales conversions, and more accurately predict business results.
Make the work of the sales department more efficient
Every experienced entrepreneur, director, or manager knows how important it is to have information about the work of the sales department. CRM provides convenient access to information about the actions taken by the company’s employees.
This will also help you know how many customers your salespeople are talking to, how often they win or lose a deal, how concerted action is being taken, and what is planned for the future. Based on the information contained in CRM, it is much easier to identify less effective employees and make recommendations for them to improve their work.
A CRM system offers the solutions that both you and your department need to work more efficiently. By using a good CRM, you build a more productive team that can get more done in less time.
Streamline the work of the sales department
Data management problems in the sales department often surface when a company starts to grow. Along with the development of the organization, the number of customers increases, and new data that must be collected and processed multiply. The process of hiring new employees and training them in company procedures becomes a real challenge, and disordered information only complicates it.
Without a CRM system, your employees don’t have time to complete their work, making mistakes due to disparate data. The key to success is the kind of business organization that you can accomplish with a CRM implementation for a small or medium-sized company.
Get access to the archive of information
Each of us had to look for information that we wrote down somewhere a year ago and then could not find it anywhere. This situation is probably familiar to both you and your employees. A CRM system helps to avoid this state of affairs.
Saving data allows easy and quick access to all information that has been entered into the system. That is why it is especially important to regularly use CRM: after all, the more data is entered into it, the easier it will be for sales managers in the future. If there is a rotation of personnel in the sales department, then storing all data related to customers and processes in the system. It allows you to avoid the loss of valuable data along with the dismissal of employees. Moreover, the manager’s acquaintance with CRM will give access to the collected knowledge and let them immediately start working on their own.
Improve customer service and increase the number of clients that you managed to retain
Customers’ expectations for how quickly you have to solve their problems are constantly growing. Many of them want an instant response from customer service and sales staff.
CRM, which supports the interaction of various departments of the company (for example, sales and customer service), can help with this. Access to data stored in a CRM system enables company employees to better understand customers and develop a unified and consistent way of communicating with them. Serving clients at a high level increases their retention rate, and as we all know, retaining a client costs much less than attracting a new one.
Is CRM implementation a good solution for your company?
This tool allows you not only to manage customer relationships – but is also a necessary resource for sharing information, improving customer service, and improving the sales process. Thanks to CRM, customer management becomes more efficient, saves time for performing repetitive actions, and improves the exchange of information between departments. If it is important for you to increase the productivity of your company, if your goals related to the development of the organization are ambitious, and you plan to improve the performance of your employees, then CRM is the ideal solution for your company.