How many opportunities have you missed?
Customers are the lifeblood of every organisation and the money they spend is the oxygen that enables the business to exist, grow and thrive.
The last thing anyone needs is to lose ‘customers’ – with an effective CRM tool it’s preventable
You may be ‘getting by’ using excel spreadsheets and shared google docs to organise products, customers, services and sales right now.
Soon contacts are spread across different programs, spreadsheets, and other documents.
Your client communication becomes fragmented and you’re not able to track what’s happening with your leads or customers.
The question is… how many sales opportunities have you missed and how satisfied are your current customers?
Why Is CRM Important
CRM has become the fastest growing software on the market today and accessibility is one of the key factors driving the growth of the CRM market size.
Businesses need real-time access to customer data, a ‘source of truth’ that’s not only essential for connecting with customers in meaningful ways, it creates alignment and streamlines your communication within the company.
An effective CRM should integrate with all facets of the business to remove information silos, ensure user uptake, create ease of rollout and build a full customer picture.
When choosing a CRM solution, being user-friendly should be top of your list in order to give your employees the possibility to work anywhere. The more comfortable they are accessing the platform, the more likely they are to use it. The key to CRM success.
Being cloud-based means access to new features and capabilities over time with limited cost and disruption, driving greater ROI benefit.
Scaling Up Growth
When you enter a phase of growth it’s easy for leads to fall through the cracks.
Improving productivity and efficiency are essential in order to reach your revenue targets. However, growing in a manageable, organised fashion is key to you scaling in a sustainable way.
A CRM allows you to automate tasks, streamline your processes & costs, improve workflow, and create more sales for your business.
Commonly automated tasks include lead enquiry data (via free web forms), capturing the types of customer interactions that lead to sales success, assigning tasks, being reminded of critical call cycle appointments and account management support effective deployment of sales resources
A CRM syncs with your email platform to seamlessly record all interactions whilst filing relevant documents via Outlook or Gmail to provide a full customer picture or status of a lead the team can access at any time. So when it comes to knowing the customer, everyone is on the same page.
The creation of a tailored sales pipeline ensures reps are reminded to follow up with leads at certain points of the buyer journey in order to close the deal.
As you scale and grow your CRM provides a helicopter view of the business – a hub of information to support data driven decision making & encouraging interaction between your sales team and customers – because if you’re not talking to ‘then’ your competition ‘is’
Customer Experience & Retention
Companies that focus on customer experience reduce churn and increase retention leading to higher profitability.
If you’re not convinced that retaining customers is so valuable, consider research by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company (the inventor of the net promoter score) that shows increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.
Understanding the customer journey is defined as the interactions and experience your customer has with your business from 1st enquiry through to becoming a happy customer.
It goes without saying that if you treat your customers badly – the less likely they will be to purchase from you.
Connecting a CRM allows you to visualise your customer journey ensuring all interactions are captured, follow up activities can be set and queries followed up on in a timely manner in order to win the business.
Consistency is key – a CRM system reminds you of milestones and important events for your most valuable contacts/customers so you can send them personalised communications to build the foundations of a long term relationship.
Connecting Xero to your CRM enables you to view the customer product mix and sales history in real-time ranked in accordance with their value to your business.
The simple idea of people wanting to feel seen, known, and appreciated by the companies they’re buying from
Clients are flagged based on how long it’s been since someone from your team has been in touch so you can make informed decisions and create customer experiences that align with your company vision.
The same truths are revealed by KPMG, who found that customer retention is the main driver of a company’s revenue.
Customer Churn
It costs 5 TIMES MORE to acquire new customers than it does to keep an existing one (Forrester)
So you can’t afford to lose hard-won clients you’ve invested time, energy and money in converting
Reducing your churn rate needs to be your 1# priority but you can’t reduce it without measuring it.
What’s even worse than having churn is not knowing why your customers churned. That’s why you need to know why each customer churned so you ensure no customer ever churns again for those reasons (Lincoln Murphy)
An effective CRM provides the tool kit to measure your churn whilst weekly /daily activity emails provide oversight as to how your employees engage with customers. Identify trends in your customer churn to proactively work with your team to fix any issues as and when they present.
Reporting & Tracking
You decide on your key performance indicators (KPIs) and how to use the reports.
Tracking and analysing metrics helps businesses identify which strategies and sales tactics produce the most rewarding results. Stay informed, test assumptions, and share results with other stakeholders to make informed decisions in order to focus attention on what’s actually working for ‘your’ business.
Conclusion
How to qualify leads and prioritise sales activities are some of the biggest challenges sales teams face.
An effective CRM streamlines business and communication processes whilst building a full customer picture so everyone reads from the same page.
You will find more leads, close more deals and retain more customers with conversations that are up to date, on point and personalised.
So if you sell a product, provide a service, or deal with customers or clients in any way, you probably do need a CRM — especially if you want to get on the business of making your company grow.