How To Win More Business With CRM Data
Winning and retaining customers is of paramount importance to the success of any business. To maximize your efforts in this battlefield, you need to have an accurate view of who your customers and prospects are and to understand their needs and desires. That’s where CRM data comes in.
CRM technology unlocks the true value of your customer data to drive effective sales and marketing strategies. In this blog, we will discuss the many benefits that CRM has to offer, to help win more business and boost sales.
What is CRM?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a data-based approach that is used to manage interactions with current and potential customers. This can help to increase customer retention and boost sales.
CRM systems and applications are designed to streamline processes and store and analyze customer and prospect data to enable businesses better understand their customers needs and wants in order to increase sales and grow their business.
How CRM Data Can Maximize Your Success
The greatest value of a CRM does not lie in the capturing, storing or organizing of data. The ultimate value lies in how the data is understood and applied by a business to future customer interactions. Without a clear understanding of the history and current status of each customer or prospect, the ability of your sales team to win and retain business and customers is severely restricted.
CRM systems use data you already in several ways, including:
- Optimizing Marketing Strategy
The performance of your marketing strategy can be substantially improved by using a CRM system. It helps businesses better understand their customers’ and prospects’ needs and behaviors. This enables a business to target the right leads at the right time to market and promote its products or services. A CRM system can also point out your most profitable customer groups. With this information, you can use your marketing resources efficiently to target similar prospective groups. - Maximizing Upselling and Cross-Selling
Bombarding your customers with random product offers will eventually leave them frustrated or annoyed. To get the best results, you need to anticipate your customers’ needs and wants, and offer them products or services they will most likely be interested in. By analyzing CRM and ERP data, such as what products your customers are viewing, what products they have not purchased, and what products similar customers have purchased, you can unlock the potential hidden among your existing customers. This can help you determine what they are likely to purchase based on their current and previous purchases, and existing requirements.
Information such as customer order and purchase history can be retrieved from your ERP system. An efficient way of viewing all your customer data is to integrate your ERP data into your CRM system. Commercient SYNC, the #1 data integration platform for sales, can seamlessly integrate these two systems so you can create reports and dashboards to view and analyze all your customer and sales data in one place. - Improving Customer Satisfaction
Bad customer service translates to loss of revenue. Providing satisfactory support fosters loyal customers who will most likely recommend your products or services. This will in turn grow your customer base and increase revenue. With a CRM system, customer-related activities are streamlined, enabling your sales team to provide efficient and satisfactory services. - Increasing Customer Retention
Losing customers is not good for any business. By leveraging your CRM data, you can identify behavioral patterns and uncover insights that will help you retain your current customers. By comparing data between existing and lost customers, you can establish what works and what doesn’t. This valuable information can be used to effectively reduce your customer turnover rate. - Identifying your Most Valuable Customers
According to the Pareto Principle (also known as the 80/20 rule), 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers. It would make sense than to focus on the 20% of customers that generate most of your revenue. A CRM system provides analytical tools that can be used to identify your most valuable customers as well as your time-wasters. With this information, you can effectively manage your workflow and assign resources to deliver appropriate service levels to your top customers, so they get the attention they need. - Helping You Win and Close More Deals
To know which sales tactics help advance a deal and which do not, you need to closely examine each step of your sales process. Every action taken and every document sent is logged in your CRM database. By observing every step taken in the last few deals that were closed, you can pinpoint tactics that generate a higher close rate and follow that same sales process to close a deal.
CRM and ERP Data Integration
A CRM system converts leads into customers, and an ERP system coordinates the process of manufacturing and delivering the products that have been sold. It also manages the financial information about those sales. When integrated, these two systems can enhance the success of your business even further.
Syncing your CRM with your ERP means that your teams can access data that is usually kept separate, from one central location. This will result in increased productivity, reduced costs, and a boost in profits.
Commercient SYNC integrates your ERP and CRM data, giving you a 360-degree view of your customers and sales in real-time. Your sales team won’t waste time jumping between systems to get the information they need. This will give them more time to focus on driving new business and improving your bottom line. Click on this video to watch how SYNC works.
A Final Word
There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ CRM software. Must-have features of a CRM system will vary from business to business. Each business should evaluate its own requirements and identify CRM software, such as Salesforce, Zoho CRM and Microsoft Dynamics 365, and included features, that can best meet its goals and objectives.
Without the support of a CRM solution to maximize your success, you could miss growth opportunities and your business will fall behind and out of touch.
If you’d like more information on choosing a CRM systems like Salesforce, please contact our partners at Edgeware; they are a Salesforce Silver Consulting Partner
To find out how Commercient can help you, please reach out to us today!
About the Author
Anna Kinnear is a Sage Financials Consultant at Edgeware, and holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Accounting Science from the University of South Africa. She has always had a passion for reading and writing.
