What can a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system do for your company?
Several recent surveys of small business owners in the U.S. revealed that their top priorities for 2015 were to increase revenue; implement systems to drive profits, and to expand their customer base. Following closely as second their business goals were: to improve promotional marketing, to become better organized, and to implement software upgrades to help achieve these objectives.
Since Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are designed to position companies to achieve these goals, it’s no wonder that interest in this software solution has skyrocketed in the last few years. According to Forbes, CRM sales are expected to have a stunning market value of $36.5 billion by 2017.
While most business owners focus on several key CRM components like robust customer profile functions, automation of routine task capabilities and data analysis tools — there is so much more that this powerful technology can do to improve your business operations. Have you explored everything that a CRM can do for your company?
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IAMS offers a basic CRM that is free for our producers: Click Here to start your free account!
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Better Customer Service
When everyone across your agency can seamlessly pull up a complete customer profile, then each customer can be treated as an individual. Each contact person will know what has happened previously and can adjust service to match that customer’s specific needs.
Increases Sales
The powerful analytic and organization functions of CRM platforms help companies improve their sales in several ways.
- Readily accessible information about buying habits helps you develop new strategies to upsell more products or services to existing customers.
- Sales teams can easily monitor their performance levels including commissions, quota achievement, deal totals, contract rates and other critical sales statistics right from their dashboards.
- By organizing and scheduling customer follow-ups, your sales team becomes more efficient and fewer sales are lost due to inadequate customer care.
- The ability to clearly demonstrate the methods of your top performers allows you to share best practices with others on your sales staff and increase overall success rates.
- CRM systems speed up your ability to close deals due to its increased efficiency.
Identify the Right Prospects
By pairing the forms on your site with an intuitive CRM that compares historical data, you can sort through prospects using qualifiers that help gauge which leads are most likely to make a purchase. Data pulled from your CRM can lower the cost of selling to certain customers because you have immediate insight into their buying habits.
Enhanced Lead Generation
By analyzing your best customers, CRM helps you create an ideal customer profile and then searches the database for existing customers and prospects that match that profile. With this information In hand, your sales team can use its resources more productively by targeting those leads that have the most potential and raise your conversion rates in the process.
The system can also automatically help you find new leads by using the profile to comb through sources like social media, website visitors, Inbound calls and newsletter sign-ups to find viable prospects.
Improves Marketing Efficiency
There are several ways that CRM enhances the work of the marketing department.
- With a database bursting with customer profile information, creating finely targeted marketing campaigns is easy. The system selects the customers whose interests most closely align with the product or service being marketed and can automatically send personalized information to them.
- While it’s marketing’s job to generate leads, it also needs to relay that information to the sales team. By using CRM to automate this task, not only does your sales team get the information more quickly but also your marketers have more time to spend on lead generation.
- The marketing department needs a sales versus marketing campaign analysis in order to reliably assess the success of individual marketing efforts. With a CRM system, marketing functions are integrated into the sales department’s operations. The progress of leads through the entire sales process can now be tracked. This gives marketing a clearer picture of which campaigns worked and which did not.
