One of the biggest challenges businesses face is how to effectively use CRM to its fullest potential. It’s especially tough for sales and marketing teams to work in unison.
Fortunately, there are several key principles that can help ensure you get the most out of your CRM. By following these, you’ll be able to make your CRM work for you and maximize the potential of your database.
Know Your Customers
Getting to know your customers and building relationships with them is the foundation of any business. The more a business knows about its customers, the better it can serve them and increase sales.
A good CRM solution is a valuable tool for this purpose. Its ability to consolidate data and analyze patterns allows marketing teams to target the most qualified leads.
You can also use the information you gather in your CRM to help build a buyer persona. This will give you a clear picture of what your ideal customer is looking for and helps your business focus on targeting them.
A good CRM solution will also allow you to follow up with your customers after they make a purchase. This can be a great way to gauge their satisfaction and see what issues they may have with your service or product.
Make It Easy to Find
CRM isn’t just about finding customers — it’s also about building relationships with them. By setting up customer segmentation and creating marketing automation processes, you can be sure to communicate with leads in a way that makes sense for them, and helps you build trust and loyalty.
Your CRM should help you identify who your ideal customers are, and what they need from you. This will enable you to spend your advertising budget on leads that are most likely to convert.
It’s also essential to ensure that everyone involved in your customer relationships knows their role, and has access to customer data that enables them to do their job effectively. This includes support teams, as well as sales and marketing professionals.
Automate Your Workflows
If you’re running a small business, you probably have a core team that you depend on to get the job done. They know your products, how to market your business and keep your customers happy.
When one of those key employees leaves, you need to find ways to keep the business humming along. Automation is a great way to do just that.
Automated workflows are a no-brainer for teams because they free up time to focus on more important things like sales and relationship building. They also improve productivity and create a happier work environment.
Take Advantage of the Integrations
A CRM’s integrations connect the customer data you’ve captured to other tools, systems, and business processes. This reduces organizational silos, saves time, and brings clarity to your entire team.
A good CRM integration will append contact details such as social media profiles, email addresses, and phone numbers to the data in your CRM. This enables your sales team to follow up with leads more efficiently and effectively.
CRM integrations also help teams collaborate better by allowing them to access productivity tools like shared templates and sequences from within the application. This eliminates the need for sales reps to log into different systems and gives them real-time access to account and contact information.
Make It a One-Stop Shop
One of the most important things a CRM can do is help users find the information they need. This means that a CRM’s search tools must be intuitive and efficient.
To achieve this, a CRM must offer predictive record counts and smart search functionality. It also must allow users to “favorite” records for easy access within lists and searches.
Having a single database of customer data also means that it’s easier to create individualized marketing campaigns. This can include upselling to existing customers or rewarding loyal customers with a discount on a future purchase.
