No matter how you look at it, there’s no denying that customers are the lifeblood of every business. As such, the relationship with customers will determine a business’s future success, and that means using CRM for business growth.
Businesses get a set of tools that help them cultivate lasting, meaningful and profitable relationships with customers. Customers get a personalized experience and the royal treatment to go along with it. The benefits of CRM stretch across the entire sales cycle, from identifying prospects and converting them to loyal customers, to keeping them satisfied and returning for more.
What Is a CRM?
Customer relationship management (CRM) solutions enable businesses to store and manage all their customers’ data. That data can be mined for insights, used to automate marketing and sales processes, forecast future sales and much more. There are many companies offering CRM for business, each tuned to help businesses achieve different goals and objectives.
Why You Need CRM for business growth?
Customer satisfaction and retention are at the heart of every business in every industry. Many business owners look to leverage robust customer relationship management strategies to develop a reputation as a customer-focused company – in other words, proper customer relationship management can increase customer loyalty.
CRM technology helps you to develop and maintain a strong customer relationship with anyone who buys your products. High-quality CRM for business growth, with all its functionality, lets you get to know your customers and prospects – and develop customer loyalty – in a much more personal way than traditional contact management practices.
But what are the benefits of CRM for Business Growth that drive entrepreneurs to implement CRM software.
7 Key Benefits of CRM for Business Growth
1. Automated data entry
A good CRM helps your employees automate data entry and create a more detailed profile for each customer. It allows your sales, marketing and customer support professionals to access the same information, as everyone is working off one central source of customer data.
Similarly, advanced CRM software uses duplicate checking intelligence, eliminating duplicate contact records from the database and making sure each customer has only one profile in your system.
2. Efficient sales cycles
Speaking of the sales pipeline, you can easily use CRM software to streamline the sales cycle for your company. One of the benefits of CRM software for the sales cycle is the availability of prospect data within its sales reports and dashboards.
Both sales reps and managers can turn to the CRM for performance evaluations and a clear picture of the work needed to reach upcoming sales quotas.
3. Increase employee productivity
“Fifty-two percent of high-performing salespeople identified themselves as power users who take full advantage of their companies’ CRM technology.”
Adopting the right technology frees up your teams from process-heavy tasks and gives them more time to connect with customers. Manual operations like hunting for contact information or entering data can be automated or eliminated from customer-related processes.
Automation across sales, service, and marketing will free your employees so they can spend more time talking to prospective customers and strengthening relationships with existing ones, moving the needle for your business.
4. Increase referrals from existing customers
By understanding your customers better, cross-selling and upselling opportunities become clear — giving you the chance to win new business from existing customers.
With better visibility, you’ll also be able to keep your customers happy with better service. Happy customers are likely to become repeat customers, and repeat customers spend more — up to 33% more according to some studies.
5. Increase Customer Retention Rates
The cost of winning new clients is five to 25 times more than it is to keep existing business. So keeping your existing clients is key to your long-term success. Marketing-focused CRMs help businesses achieve this in a few ways.
Since customer data is shared across departments, it’s easier to anticipate problems and solve them faster. CRM for business can also prevent customers from leaving because of neglect, by nudging salespeople to make contact, or by automatically emailing the customer every so often.
6. Social media engagement
With social CRM for business tools, you can leverage the power of social media for your customer relationships. These tools help you track hashtags and keywords, manage and respond to customer reviews on social media, and maintain a consistent brand voice across the various social platforms.
With so much marketing and sales activity taking place on social media these days – not to mention the wellspring of customer data that social media provides – social CRM tools are vital to modern business operations. Even if your business social pages are underdeveloped, social CRM for business can lead you to new customers.
7. Mobile CRM
Well-designed CRM software allows your team to access critical sales data instantly from their mobile devices. A mobile-friendly CRM for business is essential for employees to access data anytime, anywhere.
With this constant access, your employees can manage their appointments, tasks and deals more efficiently. In other words, with an enhanced mobile CRM system, you carry your business in your pocket.
Armed with an understanding of the benefits of CRM and what your software should include, you can find CRM software options by looking at a third-party list of product comparisons or our reviews of the best CRM software.
For Higher Customer Engagement Checkout, How to Engage Customers on Social Media? Building Your Social Media Marketing Strategy for 2022.