7 Reasons Why Your Business Should Have A CRM System

CRM system is software for organizing, management, and automatization company’s work with customers. For everyone asking, “What is CRM in Salesforce?” or, “Is Salesforce CRM system the one of a kind solution?”: the abbreviation stands for “customer relationship management,” meaning any software designed for storing lead databases, working with customers, processes optimization, etc.

Things you can do with CRM

Technically, CRM is a program that facilitates your work; it can be just an Excel sheet or Word document. It is a digital equivalent of a notebook, where you store all the names with numbers and addresses or write down some important notification on your business. So maybe your good old notebook is enough to keep up with your business and develop it?

Even if you like handwriting and manage a small company, it will never be as effective as a CRM. It reminds a case with a plagiarism checker: you know how to check plagiarism without online tools, but you’ll spend days, week, even years without it. If you need more specific examples, here are seven things you can do with a CRM.

#1. Plan, manage & control sales

Sales planning in CRM system covers diverse aspects and parameters: regions, managers, directions, etc. Managers create plans based on the client data and probabilities, analyze the number of confirmed payments for creating challenging plans for the future.

Every CRM system facilitates sales planning. It stores a history of communication with the clients, helping sales departments to analyze customer behavior and come up with unique offers, estimate volume and probability of new deals, track statuses of deals, analyze competitors’ actions.

#2. Automatize marketing processes & document flow

You can meet the sales target and reach a planned amount of leads by increasing the efficiency of marketing campaigns. CRM systems allow planning and conducting marketing events, managing resources, and budgets allocated for marketing activity. A team gets access to a library with marketing materials and tools for client segmentation, automatization of personalized email campaigns for target audiences, mass surveys, etc.

Besides increasing conversions, you’ll spend less time dealing with bureaucracy. The system provides tools for managing an internal and external workflow. It allows users to create documents by using templates and filling in the required variables and fields, find documents fast, and view versions. Meanwhile, flexible user access policy keeps everything secure.

#3. Manage your product profile

You need to offer customers something worth their money. Whether you run a small business or a corporate extranet, you need to offer high-quality products and services that are competitively priced and continuously improve product lines.

CRM systems allow users to structure stock lists and manage service catalogs. You can keep a record of special prices and discounts, analyze the data and connections for offering an optimal service package, detect the popular products, etc.

#4. Manage business processes & cross-functional communication

Transparency helps to detect weaknesses and shows what the team should focus on. The lack of communication between different departments makes the work ineffective leading to failures in key business processes and revenue decrease. To boost sales or complete the challenge you set, you need to take control of a sales funnel and process. Proper tools allow controlling the quality factors, fulfilling sales objectives, meeting the deadlines when it comes to payment and delivery.

Formalizing all these processes is complicated. If a business analyst manages to handle this task, the risk of information gaps is lower, a team works faster and with fewer mistakes, while the results become easier to predict. A CRM system assigns tasks automatically according to the logic of a particular business process and synchronizes team actions.

#5. Manage your time effectively

A CRM system allows employees to protocol time flow and plan future tasks. If an online plagiarism checker helps you to save your time, a CRM saves the time of hundreds or thousands of people. Thanks to an opportunity to establish connections between different tasks, contacts, partners, etc. you create a history of cooperation with every customer. As a result, 80% of tasks are generated automatically, letting your team spend more time on more important tasks. So, maybe you should adopt not only a plagiarism checker but also a decent CRM system.

CRM programs provide time scheduling feature, where a person can plan the scope of work, report about the status of each task, mark a start or completion, view schedules of other team members. Managers can keep track of workflow and commitment.

#6. Enjoy advanced analytical features

You already know about the benefit of automatization, but you’ll need to receive proper analytical reports to arrange it. CRM tools provide in-depth analysis of sales strategy, client profiles, their values, income, and company’s weak points.

CRM systems help to deal with uncommon tasks and reports that are important for making business decisions. They also allow tracking KPIs to estimate the work of every employee individually.

#7. Enhance customer experience

Everything listed above guarantees a higher customer satisfaction rate. If you want to attract new customers and increase the loyalty of the existing ones (you probably do), it is important to use a consistent approach for client interaction. This why connecting communication channels in a unified information environment is so significant.

When you know how to organize cross-sales/up-sales, group customers according to their interests, detect potential clients, and share this information with everyone involved in customer service, your team starts working more productively for ensuring the enhanced customer experience.

The Bottom line

A CRM system for a small business may feature only customers’ names, phones, and emails. Some will need to keep track of a frequency of visits/orders or an average check. There are no general standards of an effective software solution – it depends on your goals and specific points. Without using any CRM system, however, you risk facing difficulties with accountability, analytics, and sales strategy as a result. Your business can survive without a CRM, but you compromise its efficiency.

Melissa Thompson writes about a wide range of topics, revealing interesting things we didn’t know before. She is a freelance USA Today producer, and a Technorati contributor.