Given the vast number of marketing channels that are available today, you’ve likely witnessed that customer leads can come from anywhere: your website, social media, email referral, and phone just to name a few. Without a tool or process to keep track of them, and nurture them through your sales funnel, you could be losing out on revenues and profits.
5 Beautiful Things a Good CRM System Can Offer Your Business
Enter the CRM system, or Customer Relationship Management system – a software solution that your company needs to have in place if you want to keep track of the conversations you’re having with prospects and customers, and streamline your sales process. Basically, for businesses that are seeking more customers and profits, a CRM system helps you answer one of the single most important questions: Where are my customers slipping through the cracks in our sales funnel?
Here are some ways that planting a CRM system in your sales team can enable it to run more efficiently and win more deals.
1. A CRM Gives You Closed-Loop Reporting, AKA “The Holy Grail” of Marketing
Since the dawn of time, companies have sought to understand which marketing tactics are effective and which ones are a waste of time and resources. In conjunction with a marketing platform, a good CRM system can help with this.
When a salesperson “wins” a deal, you can simply toggle the deal stage inside the CRM to “Closed-Won”. By integrating your marketing software with your CRM software, you’ll be able to attribute a closed deal to a specific marketing tactic. Sure, this requires a plan for tracking and analytics when you are launching your marketing campaigns, but connecting the two is pretty easy.
Armed with new info about which marketing channels result in the most sales, you can then make adjustments to eliminate the less effective marketing tactics and focus on the ones that work well for your sales team.
2. Increase Sales Team Efficiency & Improve Customer Service
Yes, this is 2 things in one, but hear me out. Ever been on a call with a salesperson, spent 20 minutes (or more) telling them your story, only to be transferred to a new salesperson that asks the same questions ALL OVER AGAIN? Frustrating, eh? A good CRM, and a process for tracking conversations with a prospect, help to solve this problem.
Sales teams often need to pass a lead from one salesperson to another. But it isn’t just the contact info that’s important to transfer. It’s the entirety of the deal details that the new salesperson needs so he can deliver personalized service to your customer after the handoff.
A quality CRM tool does this. It tracks the conversations via phone and email and also can track the files that have been shared with a prospect. By reviewing the conversation timeline, a salesperson can be educated on the prospect’s history and have relevant, useful conversations with them.
3. Keep Relationships Warm
The right CRM system helps you start a conversation with the customer – and keep it going with features like email templates, conversation notes, and task reminders.
You’ve probably heard the saying, “It’s not personal, it’s business.” But business is becoming increasingly personal as customers expect individualized interactions throughout their experience of doing business with you. They want to feel special and know that you listen to their needs and intend to meet them. They want to know that you value the interaction, even if they’re not ready to buy. An effective CRM system allows you to capture and nurture those relationships from the start so that people will want to engage with you when they’re ready to buy – and keep coming back. In fact, with the right CRM system in place, you can improve customer retention by 27%. Strong relationships lead to strong sales.
4. Streamline the Sales Process
You might be using spreadsheets and other manual processes to perform various CRM tasks. This might seem like a cost-effective way of doing business but could actually cost you in the long run. As your business grows and multiple team members interact with your customers, you’ll need an effective way to streamline your processes. A good CRM system makes it easy to:
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- See who is engaging with each customer
- Reassign leads to other team members
- Track the stage of each deal so that you can better understand and manage your pipeline
5. Scale Your Sales Team, With Confidence
With the manual work removed from so many 1:1 interactions with prospects, you can now scale to a larger sales team and keep your focus on results. You’ll be able to quickly identify weaknesses in your process and fix them. With a good CRM in place, you’ll have a scalable prospect tracking tool in place, which allows every salesperson to learn quickly and move their attention back to where it needs to be: closing deals.
The right CRM system starts with an effective inbound marketing strategy.
As a HubSpot Partner agency, the RUNNER team is experts at implementing successful marketing campaigns using their award-winning software. HubSpot offers a free CRM tool, which makes the marketing-to-sales transition a very smooth process. But, of course, the software doesn’t do the work for you. You’ll need a partner like RUNNER to help you with the setup, configuration, integration, and execution of a proper inbound marketing strategy.
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Contact RUNNER for a free marketing consultation and find a solution that is right for you. We’d love to help your company grow.
