Building strong customer relationships is a great way to increase your chances of success in sales, with many businesses investing considerable time and effort into the tools they need to do this.
There is no better weapon in a sales professional’s arsenal for building strong and profitable relationships than a quality CRM system. In this article, we take a look at 7 reasons why your CRM is your most valuable sales asset.
1. It Saves You Time
Probably the most commonly understood benefit of using a CRM system is how much time it will save you. By offering you a centralized and easy to access place for information, your CRM can be used to quickly input and find information on any and all customer interactions.
One study shows that 71% of sales reps say they spend too much time on data entry.
The speed you can access key information not only ensures that you can react to customer needs quickly, but also means more time can be spent on higher-value sales activities.
The time-saving benefits of a CRM system rely heavily on the correct and consistent input of information from the team using it. If information is incorrect or incomplete, a CRM can cause confusion and lead to losses of time rather than savings.
2. It Limits Duplicate Effort
Your CRM system is designed to help you limit duplicated effort, especially in large sales teams. Acting as one centralized point of information, all team members can quickly and easily gain insight into interactions with any current or past customers.
For example, one team member may identify a prospect who they would ordinarily invest considerable time in pursuing. However, after checking the CRM they may see that another team member has already approached that prospect and found that they have no need for your product or service allowing the team member to quickly move on to the next opportunity.
3. It Highlights Opportunities
As your business grows, so too does your offering. By pairing the information you hold in your CRM with any new product or service developments you can quickly and easily identify potential new or repeat customers.
Take for example a marketing agency that specializes in social media management and want to branch out into web development and design. They could quickly and easily check their CRM to find any customers or contacts who have previously shown an interest in creating a new website.
4. It’s a Powerful Learning Tool
Your CRM is an invaluable asset when it comes to product, service, and process development. Throughout your contact with customers, you can start to gather qualitative and quantitative feedback on their wants and needs, which can then be fed into your internal decision making discussion.
Information gathered on customer challenges, preferred methods of communication, buying cycles, key individuals of influence, and even personal data such as birthdays can be used to inform and improve everything from your sales process to product features.
5. It Facilitates Collaboration
Most CRM systems are now cloud-based, meaning they can be accessed from anywhere, by anyone who has the correct permissions and an internet connection. As the trend for remote teams becomes increasingly popular, your CRM is a great way to facilitate collaboration between your sales team and the wider business.
6. It Offers Full Transparency
By their very nature, sales teams are often full of ambitious, driven individuals who want to make sales and reap the rewards of doing so. Of course, this is great for sales but can often lead to disputes when two sales areas cross over.
A CRM helps sales teams and those who manage them to easily see who has done what with relation to a particular prospect, leading to the easy resolution of disputes.
Although a CRM shouldn’t be used to micromanage and penalize sales professionals, it can be used to help managers quickly gather information on the progress of opportunities. As all the relevant information should also be available to managers, it offers them the ability to run reports, spot trends, and potential issues without hassling sales professionals to deliver key data.
7. It Provides Tools for Automation
Leveraging your sales team’s talent should be a major concern when it comes to driving profit and the overall success of your business. Automating repetitive tasks can be a good way to free up their time so they can focus on the areas that realty drive success. Many CRMs now integrate with the tools you need to do this.
For example, you may connect your CRM with an email marketing tool such as Mailchimp, allowing you to seamlessly send key sales and marketing emails based on predetermined time scales or triggered by specific events or actions.
Equally, your CRM may connect with a social scheduling tool that can be used to automate customer outreach on different channels, increasing your chances of making a connection and prompting a response.
CRM: Your Most Valuable Sales Asset
Many businesses adopt a CRM and only implement one of the benefits above. By understanding what else your CRM can do for you you can utilize it to it’s fullest potential. Increased productivity, profit, and ROI will quickly follow.
It is important to remember that unless your CRM is used correctly and consistently by your sales team, it is unlikely to deliver the benefits that it should.
How might you get more from your CRM and turn it into your most valuable sales asset?
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