What Is a CRM?
Customer Relationship Management systems (CRM) are a type of SaaS that can transform the efficacy of your sales processes, marketing operations, and data analytics. CRM systems are platforms that house all types of data related to your leads, customer contacts, account portfolios, and pipeline forecasts. A few of the most popular CRM systems currently on the market are Salesforce, Hubspot, SAP Sales Cloud, and Zoho CRM.
What Is the Purpose of a CRM?
CRM systems serve many purposes and can impact all business functions. Companies use CRM systems as a single source of truth for all teams. It is a one-stop shop for all things related to prospective and current customer information. It is often a very effective solution to a problem many companies encounter: disparate systems with mismatched data. If all of your teams are using the same source of information, the chance for human error and miscommunication considerably reduces. Marketing and sales processes tend to streamline, and approval processes usually speed up.
4 Reasons Why You Need a CRM
Sales Forecasting Accuracy
Having all of your team's sales information in one system greatly improves manager oversight of sellers. When the pipeline information is collected and reviewed by management, it makes for a much more defined and accurate sales forecast. CRMs typically have fairly robust reporting capabilities, and some systems like Salesforce come with a prebuilt structure for forecasting. Providing decision makers with this kind of holistic and comprehensive view of the pipeline and subsequent forecast has shown to improve a company's win rate.
2. Conversion Rate Improvement
CRMs are also beneficial for target marketing and campaign tracking. The system allows you to see your customer journey from start to finish. CRMs are capable of customization as well, so many marketing teams will include custom fields on leads to understand the reasons why a lead makes it through the entire sales cycle or not. The data that is collected in a CRM can be viewed at a top level or at the smallest detail. This type of information is extremely valuable in understanding conversion rates and how to improve them. It provides your teams with truly actionable information that will increase overall win rates.
3. Data Analysis Expansion
As I mentioned above, most CRMs on the market come with reports and dashboard capabilities that are fairly detailed and comprehensive. There are many ways to slice and dice your data to get different insights from the same set of data. You can drill down to a single customer interaction or expand your view to see all the pipeline wins for the last three years. There is great flexibility within a CRM to find the information you need, and in some cases you will have data outputs that you didn't even know you needed! Data analysis is extremely important to understand the reasons why the team is winning and where the team can improve.
4.Sales Cycle Shortening
The fourth reason can really be summed up by the above three reasons. When your team's pipeline and forecasting information is more accurate and complete, that will lead to better target marketing along with a total and accurate view of your data analytics. All of these factors will attribute themselves to shortening your sales cycles. When you decrease the time spent on deals and leads that you know from your new analyses are not worth your team's time, sellers can spend more time moving high converting opportunities through their pipelines and marketers can focus their efforts on campaigns that have previously proven successful. From the top to the bottom of the funnel, the time duration at all levels will decrease, your sales will move faster, and your wins will pile up quicker.
In conclusion, CRMs are transformational business tools that are often underrated in influence and impact. Implementing a CRM can touch all corners of your business and will provide you with insights to keep your company on the right track. Check it out for yourself and set your teams on an even quicker path to success.
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