In today’s hyper-competitive business world, companies have to seek every advantage they can to stay ahead of the pack. One of the greatest advantages available today revolves around making effective use of customer data to maximize sales and bottom-line results. For the average business, doing this begins with a single piece of technology: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems.
As the name suggests, a CRM system helps businesses manage every aspect of how they interact with their customers. From organizing contact information to capturing every step on the path to making a sale–a CRM system is like a Swiss Army Knife for businesses. Here’s how using one can help grow your business.
A Marketing Booster
One of the greatest benefits of using a CRM system is that it can help supercharge your business’s marketing efforts. It does this by enabling enhanced lead tracking that can follow your company’s hard-earned prospects (from online and offline sources) all the way through the conversion process. Tracking conversions allows your marketing and sales teams to fine-tune their efforts to focus on quality leads and find out what tactics work and which ones don’t.
Detailed conversion tracking also makes it possible to turn ordinary business web pages into high-volume conversion machines. By analyzing the ways that your potential customers interact with your site and correlating it with their behavior as captured by a CRM–you can make sure every element of the process helps move each lead towards your desired behavior.
For eCommerce websites, CRMs can track everything from the frequency of purchases a customer makes to the average amount of sales they bring in. This data can help you segment your customers to target higher-paying consumers who are more likely to purchase big ticket items or redeem a time-sensitive promotion. For standard websites, the same can be said for tracking how often a user visits the site or fills out a contact form. It’s a great tool to strategically target your low-hanging fruit.
Creating Outstanding Relationships
In a multichannel environment where customers interact with businesses across a variety of touchpoints, it’s harder than ever to make sure no customer is left behind. A CRM system provides a central repository for data regarding every interaction your business has with a customer, giving you the insight to keep them satisfied. It’s a vital tool for any growing business, with more than a few additional benefits, including:
- On-demand insight into customer needs, wants and desires
- The ability to create targeted follow-ups based on interactions
- Maintaining personalized relationships as your business scales
Creating Efficient Workflows
There are few things that can slow down the growth of a company faster than poor use of resources (human and otherwise). CRM systems help to prevent that by keeping business workflows orderly and efficient. With a CRM in place, all employees gain visibility into how various projects and tasks are proceeding. That works to eliminate duplicative efforts and makes sure each and every employee is spending their time on tasks that will aid the business’s growth.
CRMs also give managers a way to visualize process outcomes to see when changes to the status quo might be in order. It makes easy work of analyzing just about any business metric imaginable, drawn from any part of the organization. From measuring sales performance to making sure every department’s pulling their weight–there’s no limit to how the data may be used.
Staying on Task
In any growing business, a certain amount of error is unavoidable. After all, more work means new responsibilities for everyone, and some things are bound to get missed. A CRM can help to bring order to that chaos, providing every employee with a way to stay on-task without missing a beat.
In fact, many CRMs go further than that. They also offer high-level automation capabilities, which take mundane, repetitive tasks out of the hands of employees, freeing them up to utilize their time on more valuable work. For example, CRM automation can handle things like logging customer phone calls and chat logs, pre-populating follow-up emails, and assigning tasks to available workers. Every second saved is one that may be used to grow the business further.
Putting it all Together
Here at Comit developers and our sister agency, Rally Marketing, we’ve seen firsthand how a CRM system can help a business grow. We’ve also had plenty of experience taking the data that CRMs generate and using it to help clients achieve their marketing and website goals far faster than they imagined possible. If that sounds like something your business could use, contact us today and let our team of experts show you just how valuable a CRM system could be to your growing company!
