Today, many organizations think they don’t need a CRM system. Are you one among them who believes that your business does not need a CRM solution? Then it is time for you to see what you can acquire from CRM implementation in terms of revenue and effectiveness.
Often, we hear that customer relationship management software is only for larger enterprises. It takes a long time to set-up, slows down the business, and too expensive for small and medium-sized businesses. But this is certainly not the case.
CRM solutions are becoming more streamlined and easy to access. In many companies, it has become the cornerstone and real competitive advantage. It is observed that today, organizations without a CRM system are slowly losing out to the competitors and losing clients without even realizing it.
Why Businesses Must Adopt a CRM
The causes are quite indirect. For instance, your clients leave you without any proper notice, due to issues with the quality of service, attentiveness, responsiveness, lack of personalized offers, or because you do not contact them daily. Moreover, your marketing and sales departments waste their valuable time managing files and doing heavy administrative tasks.
You are always striking back against the competitors as you waste a lot of time on laborious tasks such as retrieving data, reporting, and more and very fewer things are automated enough to enable you to get away from daily task, you are not able to put your business on the autopilot as you still have to supervise or be there to confirm things.
Managing multiple files, along with contact information, prospective clients, sales forecasts, and more, are time-consuming and outdated. You keep on getting avalanches of emails with the same questions asked multiple times. When you lose marketing or salesperson from your department, it takes many weeks for their replacement to take charge of the area and files.
In the end, after doing so much hard work, you see your business reach a plateau and unable to manage to grow it. The worst scenario is your turnover declines from year to year.
No need to worry now as you can buck the trend.
Incorporate Better Strategies
It helps you to avoid hurdles and hidden expenses in business like, the prospective clients who are lost because their contact information remains at the level of a salesperson, or who are not contacted unless they have an immediate requirement.
Developing advertising campaigns manually instead of automation takes time to target and retrieve data. Moreover, the time is also spent on follow-up calls to everybody in the customer base, when you could be examining the behavior of warm prospects, and focusing efforts on most responsive targets.
Time spent searching for a document or email that reminds you to make a call to your client and more. The clients unsubscribe from your special discounts, offers, newsletter as they find it not being adapted and segmented to their requirements.
Capitalize Your Prospect and Customer Base
One of the major aspects is to centralize information related to present and prospective clients in a single database. In business your prospects and clients are the most significant assets. You should not leave them in Excel spreadsheets or on your desk among the files.
Moreover, you must turn them into active clients and enhance customer revenue by communicating with them daily through your CRM solution.
This way, you can improve turnover by staying in the minds of your clients, extending various offers, sending out targeted offers, keeping a promotional policy, and more. You can also increase client revenue by cross-selling, up-selling, providing extra products or services, and more.
Drive Your Business Ahead
When you lack an idea of what the month’s turnover will be until the 22nd day arrives, then you are in grave danger. The margin for revising your direction and acquiring your goals turn very tight.
You must be able to find out in the first week of the month no matter you have financial means to acquire your goals. If this is not the scenario, you need to implement marketing campaigns.
This way, you can find out how much marketing activities are costing your business and how much they are bringing in. For instance, when you take part in the trade fair, you can record the number of prospective clients that are created by the activity and examine how much turnover was generated subsequently.
This is applicable no matter what marketing channels are used- no matter it is through Google AdWords, sponsorship forms, downloading white papers, and more. Lastly, teamwork is encouraged, whether by sharing agendas, contacts, or documents.
Avoid Hidden Expenses
The sales and marketing departments have to spend 3 to 4 hours per week on drawing up their sales forecasts. The tension has to launch last-minute marketing and sales campaigns or having to justify dissimilarity between the forecasts at the beginning of a month and what has been acquired.
Marketing costs on the ongoing campaigns without exactly knowing how much they bring in when other strategies can be more profitable.
Make Client Service Your Strength
Ninety-five percent of unsatisfied clients never say much about your product, and they stop themselves by never ordering from you again. Hence, you must check your customer’s level of satisfaction with an automated post-purchase survey.
For instance, you can make sure that they are going to use your product and services and never going to spread negative comments. Also, recognize your inactive clients to retain them before they decide to leave.
Make Your Consumer’s Life Easier
Through client extranet, where your clients can key in orders, monitor their after-sales service calls. Go through the history of their requests, so they no longer need to repeat the same problem multiple times. Sending unsolicited informative messages can aid them to start leveraging their product pre-empt technical issues and more.
Provide New Services
Offer best low-cost technical support via FAQs, emails, and more along with guaranteed response times. After-sales service technicians can contribute to the development of your activity by identifying business opportunities during the after-sales service calls. CRM software solution can transfer prospective clients to marketing and salesperson, and later be remunerated for deals which are closed.
Enhance Deal Closing Rate
While selling in person or on the phone, closing a sale can down rapidly. Here are a few details which will enable you to improve your business by multiple percentage points.
Taking orders, making estimates, and more while away from the desk with a smartphone or tablet enables you to close more deals swiftly. Sales leaflets shared as well as pooled by everybody enable you to counter your competitors in a better way. Mobile access to accounting details, catalog, and more enable you to enhance response time.
Testing various versions of WebPages emails, allows you to look for which advantages, selling points, is most impact. Assessing the collective and individual performance of workers enables you to monitor people who require it and share best practices. Communicating through multi-channels allows you to send messages at the perfect time to the appropriate person through the right channel.
Author Bio:
Emma James is a freelance content writer at SutiCRM, who frequently blogs on Business, Marketing, Sales, ERP and SaaS trends.