CRM Guide - Read this to boost your turnover!
You cannot manage a company on the rise from excel spreadsheets anymore.
With the right tools, a business can quickly access the most advanced modern technologies, gain a significant competitive edge, and even become a serious competitor in industries dominated by established companies. If you are looking to grow, the most useful solution is a CRM platform!
Why? It collects and manages the information and interactions your business has with:
● its customers,
● its potential buyers,
● its suppliers,
● or other companies.
CRM is more by now than a trendy acronym that has been the buzzword in the past few years both online and offline. But why?
C-R-M is for "Customer Relationship Management". There is no secret recipe for using CRM.
A modern CRM system means more than merely customer relationship management. It is a combination of practices, strategies and technologies that companies use to manage and analyse customer interactions and data while cooperating with them. The goal is to improve customer service relationships, as well as to help retain customers and increase sales.
It is capable of managing customer information in one place, simultaneously, transparently and clearly. It enables the management of contact information in a consolidated, integrated system, tracking of new business opportunities and offers appearing in emails or social media platforms, controlof current tasks and monitoring of performance. By implementing the right CRM,you can increase sales efficiency: more deals, rising sales, improving competitiveness, more accurate forecasts – this is what CRM offers.
If you are still unsure if youreally need a functioning CRM system, we will tell you the signs that suggest,YES!
- …lack of a consolidated data warehouse
If your customer and order information is stored in more than one place, such as in a spreadsheet or on post-its glued to your computer, you are just shooting at the sales team. They do not have a unified view of all customer contact information, orders and interactions. One of the biggest benefits of a CRM platform is integration. By combining marketing, sales, commerce, services, IT and other products, you get a comprehensive view of your customer base and your team has access to it everything in oneplace.
- …intransparent business processes
When you don’t see what channels your customers use toconnect with company representatives, and have no information on how the sales team works. This makes it hard to ensure them adequate support,and of course, accountability also becomes harder.
- … when business reporting is cumbersome
Ideally, the sales team provides reports and analyses oftheir monthly progress. But creating reports manually is cumbersome and often prevents tracking.
- … if you have no mobile application
Your sales stuff may meet potential customers and obtain valuable information right on the field. But this new data is kept on handwritten notes or in files stored on laptops. Big things always happen outside the office, but sales reps do not always record notes and important details may get lost, especially when an employee leaves the company.
- … if you lose your resale/upsell opportunities
If you do not target leads based on their business value, but send the same offers and messages to actual and potential customers at different stages of their buying process without differentiating by industriesor geographic areas, you will lose opportunities.
- … if you have no plan to support rapid business growth
What would you do if the turnover of your business increased tenfold this year? Are you sure your current processes would followthis? If you know you’re going to grow, is it a concern whether you will beable to maintain productivity as well? Many businesses avoid large, sophisticated CRM systems, because theybelieve these are too expensive for the company’s budget or unnecessary for a growing business at an early stage. However, an appropriate CRM system enables you to plan features that best suit your company's current capabilities. As your customer base and team expand, the systemcan be seamlessly adapted to changing needs.
If any of these apply to you or your team, do not despair! A CRM systemis designed to handle exactly these problems. As a highly experienced Salesforce implementation partner, we are happy to help you set up the basics, and design and deploy the system.
