Did you know that only 78.5% of businesses survive their first year? This means a significant 21.5% of them fail in the first year itself.
Among other reasons for failure, 14% of small businesses fail because they ignore their customers’ needs.
This statistic indicates that companies ignore their customers at their own peril. So, when you start a business, understanding what you’re selling is not enough. You need to know who you’re selling to. Getting acquainted with customers, catering to their specific needs, and building long-term relationships with them is essential to continued success.
This is where customer relationship management (CRM) software steps in. (Have you ever wondered “what is CRM“?)But, surprisingly, over 50% of companies with 10 or fewer employees still haven’t adopted a CRM system for their business.
If your company is yet to adopt a CRM, the time to do so is now. To help you make that decision, here are five benefits of CRM software you should look at for accelerating your business growth.
#1 — CRM helps make employee transition smooth
Picture this scenario: Your star sales rep is leaving your organization, and you have to distribute the accounts to your team until you find a replacement.
Without a CRM in hand, the rep’s accounts and interactions may be scattered across spreadsheets, emails, and sticky notes, making it difficult to get a complete view of the accounts and their progress.
But, with a CRM in place, it is easy to conduct a pipeline audit. This allows you to get visibility into the accounts and understand deal stages and their progress. Thus, it can enable your salespeople to engage in contextual conversations.
A CRM enables you to
- Go through your sales reps’ accounts and understand how many deals they have in the pipeline, and which stage they are in.
- Strategize the next course of action. As you review these attributes, you can identify ways to take a deal forward and how the new rep you hire can take over.
#2 — CRM helps increase collaboration
CRM, at its core, is a software that allows your salespeople to collaborate not only with each other but with different teams across your organization.
Eric Harrington, the Co-Founder, and COO of TeamSupport agrees.
The benefit of a CRM is the growth of your business ultimately, and even more specifically, the growth of your business value. Your business needs to know who your customers are, and a CRM solution makes that collaborative and efficient.
- A CRM solution allows salespeople to share and access essential documents within the system.
- Some of the best CRM software comes with built-in communication tools that allow your salespeople to communicate with each other without leaving the CRM.
- Your sales and marketing team can share information with each other, enabling them to share the information they collect from interactions with customers.
- When leads get passed on from sales development reps (SDRs) to account executives (AEs) to take over, they need context to engage with the leads. Through the CRM, the AEs get access to past conversations, emails, chat notes, and more.
#3 — Automations help increase the productivity of your reps
Monotonous tasks like adding and updating contact information, setting follow-up tasks, sending the same email to multiple recipients, etc., can simply be automated and free up time for your salespeople to perform more crucial tasks like engaging with prospects.
- Data entry: One big problem companies that do not have a CRM face is manual data entry. CRM helps automatically capture prospect and customer data.
- Modern CRM software also comes with prospect enrichment, which populates a lead with useful information such as their job title, industry, and company. The CRM can also automatically log calls, saving reps the time taken to log every call to the respective prospect.
- Auto-assign prospects: Contacting leads within five minutes of sign-up increases the likelihood of them answering the call. The right CRM enables your team to do this by automatically assigning prospects to the right sales rep.
- Auto-create appointments and reminders: Prioritizing prospects and engaging with the right ones can seem hard with no standardized software in place. With a CRM, you can automatically create appointments and constant reminders to help your team stay on track.
#4 — Get a forecasted view of sales
Wrong numbers are bad for business.
Using a modern CRM solution can provide you with an accurate and well-engineered sales forecast. This can help you avoid major and expensive mistakes when it comes to planning marketing campaigns, gathering leads, and in your overall sales process and provides you with the ability to fix off-course sales directions.
You can do the following to get the most value out of your sales forecasting CRM:
- Pipeline forecasting: Once a deal is initiated, it goes through multiple stages in a pipeline. Yet, you can’t be sure it will move to close just because it’s in the pipeline. Modern CRM tools allow you to set a custom percentage for each stage to show you how likely it is for deals to convert to a sale. Each step indicates that the deal is more likely to close.
- Based on goals: Based on your revenue and the number of deals you’ve closed, you can forecast sales. Revenue goals give you inputs on the actual sales numbers and how likely your team is to achieve them. On the other hand, won deals give you a clear picture of the number of deals closed by a team or individual during a particular period. It will provide you with an idea of the number of deals won and determines the average deal win rates.
#5 — Improve customer relationships and reduce churn
It is called ‘Customer Relationship Management’ for a reason!
Your customers make your business, and there are no two ways about it. So, you need to provide the best customer experience for them right from when they are prospects, to when they buy your product or service. Providing the best experience for the customer starts right from the 360-degree view, a feature that the right CRM solutions have.
Kalepu Ravishekar, Director of RR-GTM Ventures, says, When using a CRM solution, one will have a 360-degree view of the customer compared to any other solution as all the other information pertaining to a customer will not be presented in a very holistic approach.
Modern CRM tools come with prospect management, but a good one tells you everything you need to know about your lead from just a single screen.
This includes customer information captured from:
- Social media
- Customer interactions
- Email campaigns they are a part of
- Touchpoints
- The tasks and appointments scheduled with them, &
- Real-time usage statistics.
You can send your customers timely emails on special occasions, and this can be done automatically from the CRM to show them you care about them.
All these benefits of CRM will help your salespeople build long-lasting relationships with customers, result in fewer leads slipping through the cracks and will help them increase customer retention.
The key to providing your customers what they want depends on how well you understand them, which a CRM does effortlessly. If you haven’t already, learn more about a free CRM and experience its benefits. They are the most crucial part of your business, and keeping them happy should be one of your top priorities. A modern CRM benefits you, your sales team, and the whole organization by facilitating ease of collaboration, data protection, customer satisfaction, and higher productivity.
