CRM / Customer Relationship Management 101 to Grow A Business

Customer Relationship Management CRM Systems For Business Growth 101

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a business strategy that integrates 3 essential components; people (internal and external), processes and technologies. One CRM application includes managing a business' interaction with its current and potential customers. CRM is heavily driven by customer data. It collects and analyzes data (of all a customer's current and past interactions with the company) with the common specific aim of improving its relationship with that customer and, in turn, customer retention and sales growth. (This can be customized according to your business' unique value proposition).

A CRM system (like Zoho and HubSpot) is used in sales (and marketing) project management for tracking all interactions in one place. When kept in the cloud (ie on the internet), the CRM allows multiple virtual team members greater connectivity through real time access anywhere globally.

Uses & Benefits of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems

• It allows a business to integrate multiple functional teams (sales, invoicing, etc), ie to have a '360 degree perspective' on the customer's experience (CX). This is so because all workers use one centralized space to log every contact with any single customer, from emails, scheduled meetings, phone to even offline activities. Specifically, each team and its members will have full access to the history of any single customer and know precisely where the business left off with a single customer, even if through another team. Ultimately, this allows you to provide a seamless and customized customer experience (CX). Since CRM also allows you to spot and merge multiple records created by different team members for a single contact, it essentially combines all of the bits of information from different locations to create a single, more complete record. In short, CRM can significantly improve your business' efficiency and customer experience (CX). Consider for instance how a sales representative can consult notes of all prior interactions before calling or responding to a customer. Perhaps that sales representative can avert a potentially bad sales day with a customer who has complained to another department over a product or issue that (s)he wanted to offer. Perhaps the customer is frustrated and on the point of attrition. With knowledge about a customer's history, the sales representative can make an appropriate and well informed decision on how to proceed with the particular customer.
• CRM tools can integrate different applications and even social media that you already use, the most common of which include Gmail, MailChimp, Facebook, etc. Consequently, it allows you to enhance your business' CRM-driven efficiency with added functionality (of each individual system). Regarding the social media integration, this also allows you to know every time your business is mentioned on social media. This therefore allows your business to respond very quickly to market sentiments.
• CRM allows you to monitor how correspondence ages and, in turn, recognize the health of your relationship with a customer in a timely manner. For instance, if a customer stops sharing information and responding as readily as before and slower than normal, you may need to work on maintaining the relationship. In fact, CRM task functions can be set to send reminders that ensure you are reminded of important tasks. For instance, you can create reminders for 'tasks' that send you email reminders when contracts are up for renewal and so on. It can essentially prevent aging of contact points.
• CRM can integrate pre-existing databases. For instance, you can import contact lists using a CSV file. See how to do this using HubSpot.

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  NB. HubSpot already has a list of preset field names (like first name, country, etc). In order to ensure HubSpot accepts your csv file with fields that are special to your field, edit the list of fields, called 'properties' in HubSpot before attempting to import your csv file.

• CRM is ideal for ensuring the continuity of a company after sales representatives are absent through vacation, retirement, termination, end of project and so on. This is possible because the data is managed in an already familiar (standardized) and accessible manner in a single place.
• Since CRM allows you to standardize and centralize all of your customer data, it is much easier to observe, make accurate management reports of, track and consequently respond strategically to market trends (like groups that respond better to certain marketing efforts, untapped geographic-related markets of hot lead, cash flow from weighted averages of the percentages on the sales pipeline, aging quotes, sales person activity to ensure salesforce is spending time in worthwhile places, etc). In turn, it also provides a better opportunity to grow your business than otherwise. For instance, CRM even allows you to monitor geographic market trends that you examine for opportunities.
• CRM offers tools that organize and track a business' sales process. For instance, you can spot the bottleneck points, ie where leads get stuck in the sales pipeline. In short, it can help businesses to identify and resolve operational issues.
• CRM allows you to automate your business intelligently. For instance, if someone visits your website and completes a contact form after business hours, your integrated CRM can send you an automatic email notification of this fact. Although this is already a common feature in contact form applications, if your market segmentation involves geographic location, the CRM goes further by establishing the lead's location as a means of determining who in your team must deal with the email and even incorporating an autoresponse email that assures the lead that someone will respond shortly. In other cases, based on the lead's contact form entries, you may even set up your CRM to quickly qualify your 'hot leads' and direct the notification as urgent to the correct person.

CONTENT RELATED TO CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

• CRM is the sine qua non that helps you to create a superior customer experience (CX)
• Encourage leads to easily book meetings using a HubSpot CRM schedulig tool. Preliminary meetings are an effective way of qualifying leads.
• Integrate incoming and outgoing emails to a HubSpot CRM, even without access to the HubSpot CRM account.
• Trouble tickets
• CRM is a key aspect of successful virtual team working
• What is your brand personality? Customers notice, trust, like and commit to a brand personality they see as compatible and with which they can have a relationship. Every touchpoint of your CRM must integrate your brand's personality in a consistent way.
• A CRM system needs one good coordinator.