When implemented correctly and used to its fullest potential, Customer relationship management (CRM) software can help tie revenue to not only your sales activities but marketing, sales, and operations, too. Additionally, good CRM software allows you to automate routine functions your team experiences on a typical day. Even simple automation can give your team more time to focus on business opportunities that require personal attention.
CRM software acts as the single source of truth for your business. Cohesive and accurate data keeps your team aligned and operating from the same information. With a CRM program, customer behavior can be tracked, giving your sales team the ability to forecast their sales pipelines better.
Even though there are many benefits to utilizing a CRM database, B2B businesses and industrial manufacturing sales teams often have their own way of doing things. Often they resist change in business operations. If something's worked well in the past, why change it? But, here's the deal — just because it's worked "well" in the past doesn't mean it's the best option for business today. The shopping behavior of B2B buyers has dramatically evolved, so sales processes need to be updated to meet these changes, or business will be lost.
Don't hear me wrong. At TANK, we love spreadsheets. We're advocates for a great data spreadsheet for sure. But, they're not the best way for sales teams to track critical sales and lead information. It can be intimidating and overwhelming to switch to CRM software. However, seeing the productivity and automation that can come bundled with a quality CRM can help ease those feelings, showcasing the incredible potential CRM software can offer.
In this article, we'll cover ten immediate benefits you'll experience after implementing a CRM. There are various ways to implement a CRM program, and how it's done is contingent on factors like company size, needs, and processes. This specific list is based on our experience implementing CRM software for clients.
Our clients say that having a single source of truth from which everyone works is the #1 benefit of using a CRM database. CRM software gives B2B businesses and manufacturing teams a central place for housing prospect and customer information. This includes details like name, address, emails, but beyond that, you can store data like service plan types, associated sales representatives, lifetime value, and support tickets.
One of the most important tips we give clients when shopping for a CRM program is not to be intimidated by what it will take to get everything into the database. People often feel the need to figure out systems and have all data entered before using them. But, that's not the case. You can continually improve and build your CRM software and data over time. Initially, enter the most critical information and build from there.
Here are the fields we recommend to start with when implementing your CRM:
Once you have all your customer and lead data in one location, your team will have everything they need to do their job better, and they'll be able to track customer behavior and trends, helping them predict their sales pipelines better.
A pipeline includes each stage in your sales process and allows you to assign values to leads based on their potential to convert into customers. By keeping track of this information, you'll know where each is in the buying process, giving you insight into what needs to happen next for them to move further through the pipeline.
Having a CRM makes it easy to access up-to-date contact information. Sales reps no longer have to track through rows of sheets or between multiple software systems to find critical contact information. And the team never has to worry about contact information getting updated in one spot but not another.
Once you've experienced this peace of mind, you'll begin to understand the far-reaching benefits of a CRM. You'll never want to go back to a spreadsheet database. Even simple day-to-day tasks like follow-up calls are more efficient when you know you can hop into the CRM and quickly find the information you need.
Your sales team can use fields in the CRM to group and filter contacts based on specific criteria. Doing this allows them to create groups of contacts or companies to whom they can send targeted communication.
These filters and segmentations also provide insight into where your revenue is coming from and highlights opportunities for your sales team, which brings tremendous value to your business operations.
You can utilize email and call integrations as well as other productivity tools with your CRM software. These integrations can eliminate the need for endless copying and pasting of deal or lead information that wastes valuable time. By storing this information in one location and having one place for salespeople to find data, you help your sales reps be more effective and productive.
Multiple pipelines can give your team the clarity they need. For example, you might set up a pipeline for existing deals, marketing qualified leads (MQLs), and new prospects. With this in place, the marketing team can verify online website leads before adding them to lead nurturing workflows that feed into the sales pipeline. Or leads can enter a pipeline first before being vetted and moved through to another. How you use pipelines is up to your team and the processes that work for them. Using a CRM in this way gives your sales team the focus to pursue prospects who are more ready to buy.
One of the greatest assets your marketing team can leverage from CRM databases is tracking which prospects and customers are coming from which channels. This type of insight is extremely valuable when deciding where to invest time and efforts to keep sales pipelines full. You can also see which deals are high-quality, closed, and have high lifetime values.
Lead scoring is a CRM function that gives you the ability to monitor engagement with prospects and connect with them at precisely the right time. When you set up lead scoring, you can assign numeric values to the prospect's actions. For example, an action could be opening and clicking through a marketing email, viewing specific website pages, or downloading a content offer. You can create automation that sends the sales rep a notification email when prospects reach a certain lead score threshold. This process might take some tweaking and adjustments over time, but this will give you the ability to follow up with leads when they're primed and ready to buy.
Do you think your business is ready to reach the next level of operational growth by leveraging CRM software? By utilizing a high-quality CRM program, your team can become more productive and efficient.
If you're interested in optimizing your sales processes and expanding your digital marketing reach, mapping your current sales processes and lifecycle stages is a great place to start. This is a solid first step in optimizing your data and contact information.
More reading: