Chapter 1
How CRM Systems Take Your Business to New Heights.
Eighty percent of business leaders from a recent study reported using CRM systems as a single source of truth for their customers. It’s clear the role of CRM has evolved beyond a contact management tool. Modern CRM systems enable leaders to effectively unite teams in a shared view of data — and more importantly, manage customer relationships with ease.
Customer relationships are key to your organization’s growth, so you need the ability to scale personalized interactions and create consistent experiences across the organization. Here's how CRM systems can help grow your business.
1. Connect with your ideal customers.
You've spent time and resources attracting and generating new leads, but do you know how to prioritize them?
How do your teams know which opportunities are the hottest? Opportunities come in various sizes and it’s important to have a strategy for nurturing them differently. Integrated CRM solutions help provide multiple departments a complete view of leads and prospects so they can create targeted engagements and quickly reach key decision makers.
2. Proactively manage customer relationships.
Eighty-three percent of sales professionals reported the pandemic increased the importance of building trust before a sale.
Develop a deep understanding of a customer’s business — beginning with a complete view of their history with your company — and you’ll build a strong relationship founded on trust early on.
A CRM system can help an organization:
Relate to its challenges: Quickly learn what matters to your customers — their goals, challenges, and preferences — and have tailored recommendations automatically sent to them.
Engage with relevancy: By collecting data on their business needs, marketing and service teams can equally recommend appropriate promotions, or educational content that aids their decision-making at the right time.
Scale your 1-to-1 relationships: As a small (but mighty) business, your customers love you for the personal experiences you provide. As an account lead in larger organizations, this doesn’t change — it only becomes more challenging to track the relationship and nuances of 100 plus customers — and when to follow up with them — when high growth kicks in. A CRM platform can host email templates, set up task reminders, and enable a single 360-degree view of the entire customer lifecycle.
3. Reduce the cost of sales.
Here are some key features of a CRM system to consider:
Optimize deal cycles: Prioritize leads and opportunities that are highly likely to convert and close based on customer interactions with your company.
Improve customer touchpoints: Know which customers are engaged and the right time to reach out for optimal response.
Clarify upsell and cross-sell opportunities: Gain a dashboard view of all the opportunities that are a good fit for add-on deals already in progress.
Uncovering referral business: Find untapped opportunities in existing relationships instead of paying for dead-end leads or wasting time cold calling.
Reducing time to close: Instantly align your team on the next steps to close a deal when you have a 360-degree view of your customer.
4. Increase employee productivity.
5. Deliver better customer service.
Seventy-six percent of customers expect consistent interactions across departments. In 2020, 52% of customers expected offers to always be personalized — up from 49% in 2019.
Even the best product is only as good as the service that comes with it — and consistency is the new bar for quality service. When cross-functional departments have immediate access to a customer’s complete history, everyone can quickly provide personalized messages and solutions, with the right resources. Simply put, smoother interactions build trust and encourage repeat business.
6. Improve customer retention.
