The best your company can get from CRM

How well do you know your clients? What's your average client "lifespan"? Do it right now: think of a random client from your database. How much do you know about him? Where is he from? How old is he? What's his education and average income? What brands does he like? What restaurants does he usually dine in? Where does he prefer to spend his holidays and what's his eye color? Try and remember anything that helps you sell your product/service to this person. If there is nearly nothing you can recall in addition to his phone number, email or last name — well, your things look blue for the moment. 

It is axiomatic that searching new clients is much more expensive than selling to the existing ones. It is also indisputable that knowledge is power. Calling your clients by their names is no longer enough: you must provide a more personalized approach — for the client will choose the company offering the best customer experience, anyways. There is no need teaching you where to look for the information about clients — the sources of this information are abundant, including CRM solutions that can help you: 

CRM helps you keep the existing clients and "inspire" them for new purchases, as well as assort them by the less "traditional" parameters, thus revealing their implicit motives and tendencies. It is also possible to trace the influence of certain events on your clients' buying activity. For instance, most people tend to be more susceptible to advertising on holidays and pay days. You can make the most of this trend and offer good discounts and free delivery on these days. 

Make up your client's buyer map. Analyze his decision-making patterns and study the forces driving him to buy. This will help you get rid of all the unnecessary information and crystallize his key customer habits, which will allow you to create the most personalized offer ever. 

Each company department or branch has unique proven business processes of its own. At the same time, all of these processes are interrelated, and the company success is directly dependent on how well they are coordinated. For example, if the marketing experts of a company are launching campaigns for demand expansion, the sales department is expected to take up the trend and gradually lead clients down the sales funnel to the deal closure; after that, it is time for accounting, warehouse and delivery to step in. It so happens that sometimes one of the stages appears to be weaker than others, and the idyl falls apart. Although such failures are considered to be of little influence, statistics show that one unsatisfied client out of ten, multiplied by 100, 200, etc. clients in fact, make quite a lot! In addition, there is also the side effect of negative feedback and undesirable comments shared with other customers. 

You can employ the best sales reps and have piles of orders — but if your accounting or delivery fails, the clients wouldn't forgive it. 

CRM is there to balance these processes — from the creation of rules of the sales cycle to the logging of all client interaction and documents arrangement. CRM solutions not only help improve the work of certain groups of employees, but also organize and harmonize the workflow of the company as a whole, contributing a lot to its development and efficiency. 

CRM reports are available weekly, monthly and even daily. Your sales reps can spend more time selling than compiling piles of reports daily. The ratings and statistics are always available. CRM builds reports automatically and displays them on the dashboard of each user individually. Automated reports eliminate the risk of information leak and save the time it usually takes to search for data.

The more departments and branches there are in your company, the slower the information exchange is: the data can get lost on the way, become outdated or even corrupted — not to mention the influence of the human factor... 

CRM is probably not designed to reconcile the conspirators, but it surely will organize and coordinate the work of different company departments and make the information exchange transparent, thus contributing to quicker decision-making and data exchange: for example, monitoring deal stages, timely closing of tasks, quick access to the information about deal/client and timely data exchange. 

Tables and diagrams can only give a part of the whole picture representing pallid statistics — but not the overall state of things. For instance, they do not reveal the influence of the marketing campaigns on sales, which is one of the reasons for the common gap between the marketing and the sales team. Sales reps are dead sure they shoulder all the company business and, therefore, have no time for reports and other marketing trash — as a result, they just provide no feedback. 

CRM can solve this problem. The company employees just just need to enter the data about clients, deals, sales and marketing campaigns in the system to let the CRM analytic tools do their job and define what is more efficient. Easy access to this information makes it unnecessary to bother your colleagues. 

This feature is known to evoke the most of disputes: the conformists advocate standard software, such as Excel, whereas the innovators lobby for CRM. The truth is, CRM is more reliable. 

CRM is a technology that already has all the tools for information collection and analysis. You only need to transform CRM analytic conclusions to business ideas and processes — and you will build more confident and durable relations with your clients, improve the quality of customer service, keep up with the times, always comply with the rough demands of your industry and thrive.

If you are hesitating whether CRM is reasonable for your business, just ask yourself: