In the world of business marketing, the techniques and strategies we take should be customer-centric. Shep Hyken says that ‘Customers are the real allies in your business mission’. If the buying potential of customers increases, then it is directly linked to the high sales volumes and an increase in the profit levels of the business. We live in a digital era where the exigencies and obligations of the customer change dramatically and they expect the utility services to be more personalized and swift. The company can deliver great returns if we focus equally on competitor’s interests and customer’s demands.
A one-stop solution to convince our consumers and to retain them for repeated business is Customer Relationship Management. CRM is an extensive approach designed with customers in mind to value them throughout the business process by various means.
CRM is a single repository where we can record our customer’s information, sales affairs information, lead statistics, marketing processes, campaign figures, and so on. CRM helps the business to streamline the operations to make the best out of it with the support of data.
Benefits of CRM Suite:
CRM can be instrumental in many ways like onboarding the customer to our negotiations, retaining the potential customers by valuing them, managing the customer base on a territory basis, enabling high lead volumes, improving the sales procedures, mining the data using advanced analytics, etc.
The core benefits of CRM are:
- Improved automation
- Prioritizing customers
- Enablement of managing customer data through mobiles
- Increased efficiency in sales processes
- End-to-end management of business tasks.
- Campaign building and potential lead generation
- Advanced data analytics for various marketing strategies
- Cost-cutting
- Territory management
- Improvement in customer retention
Features of CRM:
Lead Management:
Lead management is the process of capturing leads, nurture them, position them consistently, onboarding them to the sales team, and finally making them the potential customers of our merchandise. Capturing quality leads through CRM is a cakewalk as it has many out-of-the-box functionalities like lead scoring, analytics, campaigns on leads, etc., to track their activities throughout our business cycle.
Contact and Account Management:
Contacts and Accounts play a pivotal role in any business that we do. Maintaining data for thousands of contacts is very tedious without a prime CRM. CRM is a single repository where we can store all of the contact’s information and it can help the sales and marketing teams to use it for a variety of pursuits like sending automated personalized messages, promotional emails, etc.
Email management:
“E-mail has an ability many channels don’t: creating valuable, personal touches – at scale” -David Newman.
Email management can take our enterprises to the next level if we use it worthwhile with the help of advanced features in CRM. CRM can help sales teams to send personalized emails to prospective customers, privileged buyers which can help in holding on to them. Also, CRM can help respond to emails quickly by automated replies, follow-ups for mails, and analyzing the mail response for better engagement.
Reporting and Data Analytics:
Data-driven businesses can achieve stellar returns when compared to old-fashioned business models. Data Analytics can help study the performance of our business from a very different perspective which will help in re-modeling our thoughts for better throughput. Reporting offers a visual look at how the overall business is going through inbuilt dashboards and reporting features.
Marketing & Sales Enablement:
CRM helps businesses to create automated sales processes that can assign a salesperson to a lead, engage them and convert the lead to a business opportunity. Also, we can build various campaigns with the help of automated marketing features to promote our businesses to a wide segment. We can track people’s activities from social media sites, business websites, portals, etc., and use the data for a more prolific way of marketing approaches. This way, we can achieve customer-centric marketing as well.
Some of the services offered by CRM were:
- Social Media Integrations
- Campaign and journey builder
- Marketing analytics
- Integrations with third-party marketing systems
- Data Management
Mobility:
The digital world is moving at a rapid pace as our competitors. To cope in this competitive business world, our business should not stop even if we are stranded somewhere. This is possible if we can manage all of our business data on mobile phones. CRMs help businesses to store and view the business performance from mobiles as well which results in better efficiency and flexibility.
Automated workflows and approvals:
Workflow automation helps to reduce the consumption of time and effort for doing repetitive tasks like sales processes, sending out mail notifications, escalating a case, following up with customers. CRMs can automate the workflows as per our need, and the system will take care of all the prerequisites to ensure the workflows are running hassle-free.
With all the inbuilt features provided by hundreds of CRM vendors in the market, some CRMs do provide the option of customizing as per the business trend, which enables the dynamic use of the application robustly.
CRM facilitates structured data, sales, and marketing automation, data management, which can help businesses understand the customer’s need and it can help in indulging customer-centric strategies, which in turn will lead to high-profit sales and business growth across all verticals.
has around 5 years of experience in the areas of Salesforce platform development, software integration services, and functional analysis. Vignesh has completed B.Tech(IT) from SKCET, Coimbatore, and pursuing Masters(Economics) from IGNOU, Delhi. He is working as a Senior Software Engineer in the DBS practice, Happiest Minds Technologies, Bangalore, India. Passionate about developing robust solutions using Salesforce CRM to help businesses and has a keen interest in writing blogs, technical articles, and content management.
