CRM Software
CRM software is a vital resource for any business and any industry out there. With today’s technological advancements and the constantly changing buyer habits and employee workspace empowerment companies must adopt the CRM tool as a mission critical tool within their operations.
There are five types of CRM software, companies should choose from:
- Inbound CRM
- General CRM
- Service CRM
- Operational only CRM
- Sales CRM
Being a critical system serving millions of different customer data points the modern CRM software should support your business needs and to be able to automate and ease the process of customer data handling with the clear aim of helping your organization creating and nurturing true relationships with your current customer base.
What is a CRM software, and how it can help your business grow faster and better?
CRM, also known in its form name, Customer Relationship Management—is a software that aims to improve the relationship between a company and its existing customers, find new prospects, and additionally help in getting a 360 degree view of your entire customer interactions, journey, and potential errors. The modern CRM software gather all customer information—all in one place, making it easy for your marketing, sales, and service teams to be synced.
CRMs are a must have to any organization out there, regardless of its size or the way it operates.
Some of the benefits yield from an ongoing and the right use of a CRM software include the overall improvement of your customer service function, stronger and more meaningful customer relationships, engagement and retention of new customers, and a true alignment of both sales and marketing teams that now have full visibility on each other work.
The ideal CRM software allow you to identify and add new leads easily and quickly and in some occasions automatically by using AI, and segment them accurately. Focusing on the right leads, your sales teams can prioritize the opportunities that will close the deals, and your marketing teams can identify leads that need more nurturing and prime them to become quality leads usually using tailored email cadences.
What are the benefits of using a CRM software?
With the main objective set in place – Creating strong and meaningful relationships with customers, there are so many CRM tools you can choose from, so how you can make sure you are doing the right thing and choosing the right tool to address your business needs?
Here are some things you should look at when choosing your next CRM software:
- Integrations
- Pricing
- Scalability
- Support & Onboarding
- Your goals and KPIs
- Automation features
- Are you taking an all in one solution or a best of breed solution?
So, now that you know what you should be looking at when choosing your next CRM software, let’s dive into the benefits you’ll be getting by implementing and using such tool within your organization.
Increased revenue and customer retention
It is not secret that CRM software help you engage with your customers, strengthen your overall relationships with them and help you be closer to them than ever before, but what is the secret sauce? why CRM software is a must have nowadays?
Simply put, it helps you retain your customers, by sending them automated periodic emails related to their account status, wishing them happy birthday on their birthday, and even to help you understand which account needs more attention, and which one is about to churn with suggestions on how to mitigate the potential risks. Moreover, besides of great retention results your revenues will sky high, since satisfied customers will likely to buy more from you and most importantly, will more likely to recommend your business to their peers.
Well structured, organized, and centralized place for all of your customer data
Having a cohesive CRM strategy in mind helps in building up better cross-departmental communication within your company. Sharing user data between different departments will enable you to work as a team and help optimize the customer experience—one of several major benefits of a CRM software has to offer. Each granted employee will be able to respond to customer queries and engage with them when its most suitable for them and on their terms. By having one centralized place for all your customer interactions you ensure that both the customer experience and the employee workspace are empowered by the latest technology which fueling your business.
One place where marketing & sales can actually live together
We all know the old age debate about the fact that marketing and sales teams are often not getting along so well, and that there’s this continuous clash between the two.
Well, luckily these days are almost gone, thanks to the rise of the modern CRM software which allows a seamless and smooth collaboration between the two teams.
For example, marketers can tell which lead came from which source, which pages on the website this lead visited, and sales can see the lead journey before and after conversion so they get all the information about what type of content the lead found interesting just before they even email or call the lead.
How to choose a CRM software?
With so many tools claiming to be the in the field, here are some key points you should pay attention to when choosing your next CRM software:
- Consult with your teams, make sure you know what hurt them the most, and how to address it.
- Make a list of needed features, integrations, and automations you would expect from the new software.
- Get to know what type of support they provide, support channels, support hours, and support languages.
- Make sure that your team can use it, it must be easy to use.
- Self-serve CRM support, make sure that the new CRM has documentation, video tutorials, and even account manger who can walk you and your team through any issue that may arise.
- Pricing and scalability, read the small notes when it comes to pricing as your teams should grow with time, make sure you don’t over pay for seats or features that are not in use.
Keep in mind, the ideal CRM should make it easy for you to collect and evaluate your data. It should provide with simple to access real-time analytics so that you can respond faster to unwanted customer facing issues. It should allow you to customize your reports in order to analyze past sales patterns, redirect current campaigns and create a stronger strategy for your entire company.
Bottom line is that, data organized and presented by a CRM software leads to a better understanding of customers, which leads to a better customer experience which leads to more retention, sales, and referrals.