Collaboration and productivity are very important for any business, and having visibility and easy access to data is vital for that. One way to achieve these characteristics is by implementing a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution into your organization. But how can a CRM platform help your business?
A CRM platform helps businesses improve the collaboration between teams and stay connected to customers, among other things.
If you are unfamiliar with how a CRM can help grow your business, this is the perfect read for you. This article will cover what a CRM is, its benefits, why it is important for companies nowadays to work with one, and how to select the best CRM software for your business.
Are you ready to get into the CRM world? Keep reading!
What is CRM Software?
CRM, or Customer Relationship Management software, is a technology that helps streamline the sales process and all your company’s relationships and interactions with customers. You can build a sales pipeline, automate manual tasks, and analyze your incoming sales data to improve business relationships, stay connected to customers, and increase sales and productivity.
Why is a CRM System Important for Your Business Growth?
A CRM system can help your business grow in many ways and in different departments of your company. It can help you find the right customers, reduce the cost of sales, boost employee productivity, improve customer service, improve the collaboration between the different teams in your organization, and more.
However, the benefits are exponentially better if you have the right CRM for your needs. But how can it specifically grow your business? By providing you with all the data needed to enhance the customer’s journey from beginning to end.
The right CRM can provide you easy access to data that could be difficult to find otherwise, like how the customer interacts with your business, what product or services they bought, invoices, last purchases, who they’ve been communicating with inside the company, status of their orders and more. Additionally, it can help you manage any significant customer service issues raised across any social media platforms or departmental channels without losing track.
Furthermore, you can also get information from your customers’ social media activities and find out what they are saying about your business or competitors. This alternative information is very useful and can help you gain a more rounded view of your customers, make a more accurate forecast of their behavior, and create a hyper-personalized customer journey, which in turn will make them want to return to your business, increasing loyalty and retention.
Finally, you can customize a CRM platform to better fit your business needs by syncing the platform with your favorite business apps for e-signature, quote, billing, sending emails, document generation, marketing needs, and more.
One example of a customizable and comprehensive CRM system is our own lending CRM platform, which effectively combines all the essential features required for professionals working in the alternative business lending field.
Benefits of CRM
- Get a complete view of leads and prospects to create engaging communication.
- Use your CRM to record your client’s goals, challenges, and every exchange to recommend the best products and services for your clients.
- Gain better visibility into the upsell, and cross-sell opportunities of your customers.
- Increase the productivity of your team by automating manual operations.
- Gain easy access to your customers’ entire history to improve customer service.
- Boost your customers’ retention.
How Does a CRM Platform Help Your Sales Team?
Generally, a CRM can help your business in different ways, but let’s discuss how it can specifically help your sales team.
With the right CRM platform, your sales team can improve the quality of their pipeline and prioritize leads that have more possibility of converting. Additionally, by having visibility into the customers’ interaction history with your company, your sales reps can see if the customer is the correct fit for a product or service, if they are engaged with your business, when to contact them, or the next steps to follow to close the deal.
In short, a CRM solution allows the sales team to:
- Better manage their constant flood of data.
- Identify sales opportunities faster.
- Have the information needed to close a deal accessible in one central place.
- Be more efficient by automating administrative or repetitive tasks.
- Streamline sales processes.
- Establish a reliable step-by-step sales process.
- Track quotas and goals and evaluate their performance at a glance.
How Does a CRM Platform Help Your Marketing Team?
Sales is not the only department that benefits from implementing a CRM solution. Marketing also gets a lot of benefits from using a CRM platform.
By deeply understanding your customer’s needs, challenges, likes, and dislikes, and by knowing how your clients interact with your business, all this information in one centralized place, your marketing department can improve campaigns, personalized interactions, discover new opportunities and forecast customers future needs, helping your business always stay one step ahead of the competition.
A CRM platform can help marketers segment accounts, identify the best prospects, and design marketing plans to better target each group. Additionally, it allows your team to create, schedule and send personalized email messages, boosting the company’s email marketing strategy and increasing brand awareness.
Finally, by getting easy access to key customer data, you will not only be able to provide a hyper-personalized service and customer experience, but also you can have a more accurate forecasting of their needs to strategize high-converting marketing campaigns that can drive targeted traffic to your business and turn prospects into buying customers.
How Does a CRM Platform Help Your Customer Service Team?
The job doesn’t stop after selling the product. You can offer the best product on the market, but the best product is only as good as the service that comes with it. So, if your customer service is failing, your business also fails.
However, a CRM solution is literally made to improve a business’s customer service. By having all the information in one place and facilitating the collaboration between departments, the customer service team can address customer inquiries faster, have the customer purchase history at their fingertips, and provide the best solution, follow-up, or answer to their inquiry without any problems.
The customer service rep can record all relevant notes from the interaction with the customer in the system and pick up exactly where they left off if there is another inquiry. They can provide personalized solutions, messages, and resources, check the status of orders, or follow up on a customer’s question through any channel or social media platform without losing track.
This type of customer service increases customer trust in your business, builds loyalty, and boosts retention, encouraging customers to keep coming back.
How Does a CRM Platform Help Your HR Department?
A CRM platform is not only useful for sales, marketing, and customer service teams. It can also help HR departments streamline their processes, improve communication and collaboration between team members, and help HR departments make more informed decisions regarding new vacancies and candidates.
Specifically, there are many ways a CRM system can be of use for HR, for example:
1. During the recruitment process. The CRM software can help record and track candidates’ information, schedule interviews, communicate with applicants, encourage candidate engagement, segment the talent pool, conduct candidate surveys, and share the applicant’s information with hiring managers to make a more informed decision. Effectively streamlining the recruitment process, providing everything in one place.
2. Managing employee data. The HR manager can use the platform to store and manage employees’ personal and professional information, like employment history, payroll, job performance, time off, purchase requests, benefits, and usage.
3. Evaluate employee performance. A CRM platform facilitates the tracking and evaluation of employee performance and goal setting through a performance graph and managing performance review.
4. Onboarding process. This platform helps HR managers to ensure that all the necessary steps for onboarding new hires are taken and the process has been completed efficiently and effectively.
How to Select the Best CRM Software for Your Business
Many CRM systems are built with great features designed to help improve business processes; however, not every CRM will work for your business. To choose the best CRM software that will meet your business needs, there are some questions that you need to consider beforehand.
- Why do you need the CRM platform?
- Which tasks do you need it to perform?
- What type of data do you need to store?
- Do you want On-premises or Cloud-based CRM software?
- How do you want to access and analyze the data?
Once you have answered these questions, you can consider other factors like:
1. Features: You need to check if the software offers the common features all modern CRM platforms offer, like reports and dashboards, lead management, project management, mobile access, and task management, among others. Additionally, they should provide features that can help you achieve your business goals and meet your specific needs.
2. Scalability: It is imperative to select a CRM that can be scaled and grows as your business grows and can accommodate an increasing number of users and data.
3. Integration: You need to consider if the platform can be easily integrated with other important systems and tools you use, such as email, project management tools, accounting software, or other third-party applications necessary for your business. Additionally, the ability to easily integrate into social media is essential, especially in today’s digital world.
4. User-friendly interface: One of the most important factors should be that it is easy to understand and simple to use and navigate on a daily basis. This will facilitate the training of the CRM, motivate the team to adopt the new platform, and increase user adoption.
5. Flexibility: It is necessary to select a CRM platform that can be customized and configured to meet your unique business needs. The platform should allow you to align the software with your business structure and processes.
6. Cost: Whether you are a small or large business, you need to consider the cost of the software, including any additional cost for features, additional integrations, and support or if you need an implementation team to customize it to your needs.
7. Customer support: The quality and availability of customer support is another thing to consider. Will you have live support? Online resources or training? These are questions to take into account when selecting your CRM.
8. Mobile-friendly: If you need a CRM for call centers or banking, you need a CRM that offers mobile access and is compatible with Android and iOS devices. This feature can help improve the productivity of your team, as well as boost sales.
9. Easy accessibility for sharing information: It is very important that CRM software offers the ability to share information within the team, improving collaboration across the organization.
Best CRM Software in the Market
Now that you know how to select the best CRM for your organization, you need to start reviewing the CRM platforms available in the market. Lucky for you, we did just that and selected the top 5 CRM in the market for you. These platforms are considered the most popular in the market due to the wide range of features they offer, their strong track record, and their proven ability to help businesses manage customer relationships effectively. These top 5 CRM in the market are:
1. Salesforce: As the industry leader, Salesforce offers a wide range of features, integrations, and customization options and can be implemented across several different industries and verticals. Additionally, Salesforce offers a strong and scalable platform for sales, customer service, marketing automation, and more.
2. HubSpot: This CRM is a complete inbound marketing, sales, and service platform. The platform offers extensive tools for customer engagement, lead management, and analytics.
3. Pipedrive: This platform is best for simplicity. It’s a sales-focused CRM platform that offers a visual and easy-to-use interface for managing sales activity and pipeline. It is ideal for small businesses that want a simple CRM for lead management.
4. Zoho CRM: This comprehensive and affordable CRM solution offers a variety of features for sales, marketing, and customer service. This is best for startups and small businesses for its pay-as-you-go pricing.
5. Microsoft Dynamics: This cloud-based platform offers a range of integrated business applications, including CRM, ERP, and finance. Additionally, the platform offers robust integration with other Microsoft products, and it’s designed for enterprise-level businesses.
In Short
A CRM solution provides a comprehensive view of your customer from beginning to end. You can use it to better understand your customers and prospects, manage customer service inquiries across channels, sync your platform with other business apps so you can get an accurate 360-degree view, and more.
Salesforce is an excellent choice for your CRM platform, as it provides you with everything you need to improve the collaboration between different departments and can be customized to your specific business needs.
If you are starting with Salesforce and need the help of an experienced Salesforce Implementation Partner to make it fit your business needs, get in touch with Cloudsquare, a Salesforce Consulting and ISV Partner, and let us help you reach your short and long-term business goals.