Why Your Business Should Use a CRM
Getting customers to buy your products or services is always one of the two essential goals in any business. Keeping them coming back is the other one. Both will not be possible without building a solid relationship with your clients or customers. Starting a business without knowing who your customers always end up in bankruptcy.
If your business is in the middle of the desert where you are only selling water to 10 nomads, then your memory should be sufficient to store all the information about your clients and what they need— not to mention you wouldn’t be reading this, too. If you think your business is not as simple as that, then your business should use a CRM (Customer Relations Management). Here are 4 main reasons why:
1. You need more than just a phonebook for your client’s information.
A typical phonebook always has the information for your contact’s name and phone number. Sometimes that’s all you need. However, you might need other important information depending on your business.
Oftentimes you need your contact’s email address so that you can follow up via email and especially if you want to send out email campaigns. You also might need their website if you are running a digital marketing agency. A physical address will be useful if you want to send out post mail.
As your contact list grows from your referrals and marketing campaigns, it will be even harder to remember where your contacts came from. Some CRMs have the functionality to link contacts to organizations, deals, projects, and other contacts, giving you a story of how your relationship started.
As important as knowing how your relationship started is knowing how it progressed. This is where the “relation” component of CRM comes in. Most CRMs track the past interactions that you have with the client—your outgoing calls, email campaigns, and meetups. They also track clients’ past interactions with you—the campaigns they opened, incoming calls, and orders. Imagine the edge that you or your salesperson have if they have this past information before reaching out to the client to close a sale or even up-sales or cross-sales.
2. You need to assess and optimize your strategy in getting sales and more.
There will always be failures in life and also in business. But perhaps the best definition of failure is not knowing why, how, and how to prevent it from happening again. Wise businessmen always turn to data in order to evaluate the business’s performance, target bottlenecks, and ultimately, optimize their strategy.
If you have been gathering information on your interactions with your leads and contacts, and your lost and won deals, then you are most likely to figure out which approach work and which does not.
Most CRMs have basic reporting capabilities to show you key metrics and KPIs for your sales and marketing efforts. Some even have advanced reporting capabilities so show you a more detailed presentation.
3. You need to hit your client’s need where it matters and improve your relationship.
In this fast-paced world, respecting a person’s time is paramount. That is why there is such a term as “elevator pitch”.
It is hard to come up with such a succinct pitch if you haven’t been tracking your client’s pain points. Most of the time you will end up jumping from one pitch to another, waiting to hit your target.
Having a CRM that keeps a profile of your contacts will cover a lot of ground in determining your customer’s needs.
By then you can segment your contacts to send relevant email campaigns and even craft specialized sales pipelines each for different segments.
So how are you going to gather that information aside from doing outbound sales calls and manually recording in your CRM? Some CRMs integrate with survey forms that you can send to contacts. Some even integrate with social media so that you can get information readily given by your contacts straight from their social media profile.
4. Technology has advanced and it’s more accessible than before.
Before, CRMs are only available on-premise, meaning they have to be locally installed in your company’s computers. You also have to pay a huge one-time amount for a setup—which oftentimes include features that your business does not need.
Now, CRMs are readily accessible in the cloud as Software as a Service (SaaS). They now even have flexible pricing plans where you can pay only for what you need.
Are you planning to use CRM for your business? Book an appointment with us so that we can explore different options that will fit your business.
