Whether you run an industry-leading brand or you’re just setting up a new B2B business, you can benefit immensely from implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) solution. This tool helps you to automate most of your everyday tasks while also making it easier for you to predict useful business trends. If you’re looking for ways to scale critical processes like sales and ultimately boost your profits, CRM is a must-have acquisition.
Overview
Identify the right leads to pursue
When running a B2B business, lead generation forms the foundation of all sales cycles and is key to the overall success of the company. It is through this process that you can build valuable connections and close most of your sales with potential customers.
However, the quality of leads matters a lot when you want to increase your conversions. The idea is to target the right audience that shows sufficient interest in your products. You don’t want to waste time and money trying to persuade people who do not immediately need whatever you sell.
So, how do you determine who to pursue and who to overlook?
A highly effective way is to implement a CRM tool. The best ones come with functions such as lead scoring. Essentially, this is the process of assigning a score to a lead based on their actions while interacting with your business. These apps take into consideration factors like email open rates, social media activity, and web scrolling patterns, among others. In the end, they help you identify the most engaged leads so you can prioritize your resources and efforts on those.
Improve collaboration
If you manage a team of people to help you with sales and marketing, you probably already know how challenging it can be trying to coordinate them. Your typical days are probably spent calling and emailing your reps to inquire about their progress, scheduled meeting, and reports. But it doesn’t always have to be this much of a hassle.
With CRM, you can effectively streamline these and many other collaborative processes as we’ll see below.
- Templates
Upload template files to your CRM solution to guide your salespeople on how to structure emails and documents. You can also integrate email autoresponder tools like Mailgun or Sendgrid, which come with ready-made email templates to ease your work.
- Calendar integrations
Calendar integrations improve visibility into meetings and call schedules so that you can avoid cases of double-booking.
iii. Reports
One of the primary responsibilities of sales reps is to report progress, usually daily or weekly. This is important for two reasons; to enable you to track their productivity and to understand the direction your business is taking. CRM solutions facilitate easy reporting, so you don’t have to keep reminding your reps to send you updates and sales reports.
Improve your data management
One of the most useful features of CRMs is data management. Long gone are the days when you needed to stack paper files in your office shelves for record-keeping. We’re also quickly moving away from storing data on personal computers as they can also crash or get lost. This is where cloud storage, which now includes CRMs or their integrations, comes in.
For starters, CRM solutions let you collect and organize your customer data in a single location using their contact management feature. What’s more, some even aggregate relevant data and present it in visuals such as charts and graphs. This way, your sales reps can have a clearer picture of every critical metric that matters the most to your sales process. Besides, with your data appropriately organized, you eliminate all guesswork and every sales decision you make is backed by robust data.
Enhance customer support
With new businesses sprouting daily and competition in all industries increasing every year, an excellent way to stand out is by offering exemplary customer support. Besides selling high-quality products, it’s imperative that you also provide excellent services before and after making the sale.
For the best results, your sales team needs to have access to the entire customer history, including their interactions with your business, their purchases, and even personal information like age and location. This is precisely what a useful CRM tool does – letting you know your customers better.
What kind of content interests them? What are their biggest struggles and goals? What are they talking about or sharing on social media?
If you can answer these questions correctly, it becomes easier to crafting personalized messages and creating appropriate solutions that meet your customers’ immediate needs. This is key to closing more sales and facilitating more repeat business.
Save time and money
Multiple studies show that the average salesperson spends only about a third of their time doing their most important task – selling. The rest of their working time is spent doing non-selling activities like manual data entry, managing social media, or sending repetitive emails to prospects. Doing this significantly reduces their overall productivity and slows down sales.
A good CRM software automates the majority of administration work, thereby freeing up sales reps. This allows them to spend more time completing tasks that significantly impact your business’s bottom line. What’s more, it minimizes cases of human errors which can be quite costly in some cases.
Boost customer retention
A proven way to cut down the cost of sales is to increase the customer retention rate. Studies show that it can cost up to five times more to acquire a new client than it would retain an existing one. If you’re looking for ways to keep your customers coming back after that first sale, consider acquiring CRM software.
For starters, this tool increases visibility across your relationships with paying customers. This helps you identify at-risk accounts and address any potential concerns that might be pushing your customers away. Besides, you’re able to identify satisfied customers who are likely to respond positively to new products if they are presented to them at the right time.
How are you using CRM to boost your sales and profits? Share your feedback in the comments below.