If you’re not familiar with the concept of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), it’s time you gave it the attention it deserves. Namely, it’s a great tool for collecting a huge amount of data, such as your customers’ demographics, location, spending habits, engagement with your brand and feedback they provide. Since every company needs these types of information, you should really consider how you can implement such a system. To help you with that, we’ve prepared a list of main reasons why you should go down that path.
1. Boosting Sales Conversion
Every business communicates with existing and prospective clients through various marketing messages. However, for those to work, you need to make them relevant and send them at the right moment. Also, you need to be aware that many people are extremely worried about various types of cybercriminal, which makes them reluctant to respond to approaches online. With a CRM system in place, you have the information about their age, gender, location and preferences, which allows you to target your customers in a much more precise way, catering to their exact needs. This will lead to an increase in your sales numbers, i.e. more profit.
2. Greater Customer Satisfaction
We all know how important customer satisfaction is. Not only do returning customers provide steady income, but they are also most likely to recommend your products or services to others, thus helping you grow your client base without investing a lot of money in advertising. How can a CRM solution help you with this? It helps you create personalized customer experiences, where customers feel that you really understand their needs and wishes and that you’re the one who provides solutions. The more satisfied customers, the bigger the profit.
3. Keeping Everyone in the Loop
One of the benefits of a good CRM solution is the feature that allows people working on the same project or in the same company to exchange data and messages quickly using different devices. One such great Gmail CRM solution is Shared Contacts for Gmail® that can be integrated into your Gmail inbox, from which you can share your contacts with anyone using Gmail or Google Workspace. Having an up-to-date and fully synced contact list that everyone can maintain and access at any time is a great benefit, especially for larger teams.
4. Reporting
Another feature that a great CRM solution offers is the option to receive feedback on your performance. You can see and analyse what your sales representatives have been doing for the past week, month or year and use that info to pinpoint what those successful ones are doing and what those who are underperforming are doing wrong. You can also receive info about products or services that sold well in the previous period and about marketing strategies that have generated the most significant returns and those that failed. Finally, you can see whether your targets will be met at the end of the period, which means you can analyse trends, monitor KPIs and predict future sales. All that is possible with a small investment in a great CRM solution.
5. Task Tracking
CRM solutions also come with task management and tracking features, which allow salespeople to stay on top of crucial tasks and allocate tasks to colleagues. Reminders can be set to alert everyone on their phone or via email, so that no task passes unattended. Finally, tasks can be organized by contact, company or project and you can also add notes, which is quite handy when more than one person is working on a project.
6. You’ll Get More Leads
A CRM system can also help you generate more leads, which is one of the aims of every business. You can put a webform on your homepage and ask for a visitor’s email address in return for a free gift, such as an ebook. Another way is to gain referrals by using the information provided by your CRM solution about your most satisfied customers. Just contact them and ask them to refer your company to a friend or family member.
7. Improved Customer Services
As we’ve already established, satisfied customers are of utmost importance and effective customer service is the best customer retention strategy. Only those pleased, or hopefully delighted, with your offer will return and spend more money. Also, you need to find out what dissatisfied customers find off-putting, so that you can fix it. A CRM system will help you do that, as it tells you what the most common complaints are. Advanced CRM solutions will even let you send out customer surveys and gain feedback.
These are just some of the most important reasons why you should at least consider investing in a CRM system. As you start discovering all the other features and options that become available, you’ll probably be able to create even more efficient strategies, which should in turn yield much better business results. If you do it properly, you’ll see the investment in a CRM system as one of the best you’ve ever made.