A CRM offers businesses many benefits that help them increase revenue and customer lifetime values, increase sales, nurture leads, improve customer service and product offerings, reveal data trends and forecasts sales and save time.
Reduce time-consuming administrative tasks
Automation tools remove repetitive tasks from your marketing, sales, and customer service team members’ to-do lists, allowing them to focus on what only humans can do.
This means more time for your team members to improve their presentation, stick around a little longer to support an upset customer, or A/B test to learn how to create the most compelling marketing campaigns.
For example, marketing teams can rely on automation to segment customers, then design, publish, and report on targeted campaigns. Similarly, sales reps can automate customer data entry and interaction history, then use the insights to nurture leads through preferred channels.
Increase sales through increased lead follow-up
Using CRM for lead tracking, you can collect preference and behavior data from leads as they move down the sales funnel while also collecting notes on every interaction they have along the way. You can even tag leads based on their stage in the pipeline.
So, it automates all follow-up and reminder tasks. With all your notes in one place, any member of your team can expertly complete the next steps. In the end, more customization means more conversions.
Take advantage of greater personalization through segmentation
Lead tagging and scoring allow you to define audience segments based on their personal data or stage in the buyer’s journey. Working segment by segment, this segmentation makes it easy to personalize audience journeys with your business through targeted outreach.
In the end, personalization through segmentation leads to better customer experiences and therefore more conversions, higher customer retention, and even higher customer lifetime values.
You can define leads based on your industry, location, purchase history, conversion stage, or how they found out about your brand. You then use those tags to target each segment, offering personalized sales outreach, marketing campaigns, or upsell opportunities that your customers will love.
For example, you can launch a marketing campaign that targets sales leads that make your brand appear to be in tune with their current needs.
Democratize stakeholder knowledge
Your sales and customer service reps often store a lot of valuable information in their notebooks, headers, calendars, and contact lists. Unfortunately, this means that if a key salesperson leaves, so does this valuable data – data that can otherwise be used to drive conversions now and in the future.
A CRM works to capture all of that information so that anyone in your company can take the lead.
Automates data analysis and reporting
Large data sets, when handled manually, often overwhelm company representatives, leading to lost qualified leads and undervalued customers.
A CRM solves this by constantly capturing leads and customer data automatically, then following up on each interaction or touch point with little effort from your team. From there, automated data analysis kicks in, creating instant reports that reveal actionable opportunities and reminders to seize them.
Provide prompt customer service at all times
CRM automation tools scale superior customer service. You can use website chatbots to receive complaints or access your CRM’s knowledge base to automate responses to repeated questions. Then, to escalate complaints, you can use the chatbot to trigger a ticket within your CRM, routing customers to team members who are best responsive.
Centralized customer notes and histories help team members anticipate needs and prepare stellar solutions.
Create a feedback loop
The CRM gives you all the capabilities you need to collect interactive data from leads. When CRM data is visible across all departments, this data can reveal information that easily lends itself to better product or service offerings or fine-tuned marketing campaigns in the future. As such, insights from the data can be linked to your sales and lead development processes.
For example, your sales reps may repeatedly make CRM notes that reveal potential customers are hesitant to buy once prices are discussed. CRM can highlight this trend, thereby alerting your marketing team.
In response, marketers can create campaigns that highlight newly added or competitive features, making those price increases look like bargains. In turn, when newly qualified leads reach the conversion stage, that point of hesitation is nullified before it even forms.
Increases customer lifetime value
CRM helps companies offer superior customer service. Additionally, they identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities through customer and lead segmentation. They also create feedback loops that consistently lead to improved offers and free up your team members’ time to engage with customers on a more consistent basis.
In the end, these benefits lead to positive customer experiences that keep customers coming back to buy more.
Sales forecast
At some point in our lives, most of us have reflected on how much easier life would be if we could see the future. A CRM offers companies that ability through sales forecasts. Instant reports reveal whether you are likely to meet or exceed sales targets.
Perhaps even more important, CRM sales forecasts tell companies whether they are likely to miss sales targets, giving companies the time and insight to change their strategy and get back on track before they hit. be too late.
