What’s A CRM and Does Your Business Need One?

Many complex moving parts are involved in operating a profitable company, but at its core, business success hinges on just one thing: customer relationships.

Which is why customer relationship management software is vital for entrepreneurs who want to grow their businesses.

A CRM solution helps your company nurture and improve customer relationships by maintaining centralized data on all your leads and existing clients. With access to a history of customer transactions and communications, your team can make their next move with confidence while offering highly personalized customer service.

Read on to learn more about how implementing a CRM can improve efficiency and increase sales for your business.

3 ways to increase productivity

A tool designed to record, maintain, and assess data about your leads and customers is a huge time saver that will help you and your entire team.

First things first, imagine how many hours it would take to create and maintain your own system to track your customer’s buying journey. Then consider these other benefits of using a CRM.

Streamline workflow

A CRM can improve organization of tasks, coordination of duties, and collaboration – for example, when employees are assigned different aspects of a project.

Prevent brain drain

When an employee takes a holiday, goes on parental leave, or moves on permanently, anyone on your team will have access to the information they need to pick up where your sales team left off.

Scale (minus the growing pains)

There aren’t enough hours in a day to personally manage all your customer data and communications. A CRM makes it possible to take on more clients and manage a larger amount of data, so you can maintain client relationships, follow up on leads, and serve more customers as the business grows.

Increase revenue and sales

Investing in a CRM can have a very high ROI, empowering you to close more sales.

Here’s how.

• Improve communications

  • A CRM makes it easy to connect with your list of prospects and customers in person, by phone, and by email. Your team will make the right impression in every interaction by being current on each customer’s history of communications and sales.

• Identify segments

  • Segmentation is a strategy you can easily take advantage of with a CRM, by grouping prospects by interest and location in your sales funnel. With this information you can customize your communications with leads and increase your conversion rates.

• Upsell and cross-sell

  • A CRM can help you easily identify opportunities to introduce higher priced or complementary products to your customers based on your records of previous interactions and sales.

The bottom line: happier customers

Using a CRM is the key to an organized sales system that allows you to offer your customers exactly what they want, at the right time, and in the most appealing way.

By maintaining an up-to-date database on every lead, prospect, and customer you’ll be able to serve each one more effectively, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty – with no time wasted internally by the need to catch up on previous interactions.

The most important considerations when researching a CRM is that it’s easy to use – so be sure to take advantage of a free demo or trial. You also want your CRM software to be scalable, and to integrate seamlessly with your other business tools.