You need a CRM … no listen … you really do!
Wherever you and your business are, from just starting to beginning to see serious growth, you need a CRM. If you are just beginning take a good look at this blog and avoid unhealthy habits. If you are a growing business take a good look at this blog and make sure that you are maximising the use of your CRM.
What is a CRM?
A CRM is where you manage your business relationships. It is where you keep ALL the information about your customers and your contact with them. It is from where you will drive effective marketing campaigns and where your sales and marketing teams will come together to progress your strategies.
They are expensive, how will they help me?
They are not expensive. Some of the best versions offer a forever free option that you can upscale when you need to. It is worth researching which one best suit you. From the very beginning you will see:
- Better knowledge of your customers – a CRM helps you record the date, time and subject of every phone call, email or visit and the customer’s response to it. No longer will you have to rummage through tatty A4 pads looking for those notes you scribbled the last time you spoke to this customer, trying to remember what deal you offered them. What’s more you will know that since you last spoke, they have read three emails from your marketing team and clicked through to the pricing page of your services.
- Better anticipation of needs – because you know what your customer has been up to since you last spoke to them you can offer a better service by suggesting something to them before they need to ask.
- Better customer retention – it is imperative to build trust between you and your customer if you want to keep them. By giving you a complete picture, your CRM allows both you and your customer to feel comfortable that you have a correct, shared view of the sales and service history.
- Better use of sales time – your CRM will make it clear who is managing each customer and prevent sales reps sending mixed messages to valuable customers.
- Better alignment between sales and marketing – no longer will your sales team howl, unaware of the email campaign your marketing team sent yesterday to customers they are managing making the sales team them look foolish when they aren’t ready to answer key questions. Sales and marketing will work together to carefully segment your customer base increasing the impact of customer specific messaging.
How will you know how much the CRM is helping?
Here are just a few of the processes that will be improved at once:
- Reporting – You probably spend hours pulling together reports, showing customer contact rates, email click-through percentages, revenue uplift and, and, and. If none of your data is centralised, you will be getting different stories from different systems and your final report will be a mishmash of data that you have managed to cobble together. What’s more you might not be able to remember the cobbling process every time, so you aren’t comparing month on month data properly. If you are basing key decisions on these reports, you are threatening the validity of any change you recommend. A good CRM will let you set up reports that run regularly giving you exact, consistent data giving you the ‘correct’ picture of your business. The time you save can be used managing your customer relationships better and making sales.
- GDPR compliance – it is easy to brush this under the carpet and assume it’ll probably be okay. If you are keeping customer details stored in a pile of spreadsheets, scruffy pads and cocktail napkins you are breaking the law. Keeping your customer details on a CRM will make you GDPR compliant and make it infinitely easier to manage.
- Segmenting and list building – When they are planning email campaigns your marketing team are spending hours and hours trying to create lists from data kept on incomprehensible, colour-coded spreadsheets. You often find them sobbing at the end of the day. A CRM will let you tag and retag customers making it easy for the marketing team to pull together niche lists. The response rates will improve, the sales team will get hotter leads and your business will grow.
Still not sure?
Ask fellow businesspeople and find out how they are benefiting from using a CRM. There are lots of blogs that will help you make the decision. The platforms offer free trials so, apart from time, you are not losing anything exploring the possibilities.
Sign up for a free trial, involve your team in developing the best processes for using it and see both staff morale and your revenue get better and better.
Talk to us and we will help define your needs and ensure that you select the right solution.