How to use B2B CRM to improve B2B relationships

According to Forbes, 44% of companies focus on customer acquisition, while only 18% focus on customer retention. However, research has also found that just one bad customer experience can lead to customers leaving your services for a competitor. It’s no secret that customer acquisition comes at a cost. However, when you focus on customer retention, you can bring down customer acquisition costs significantly, as well as lay the foundation for forecastable revenue via repeat customers.

That’s where B2B CRM comes in. 

But what do you mean by B2B CRM? How does a B2B CRM system help improve B2B customer relationships? Keep reading for answers to these questions and the top 5 tips to make the most of your B2B CRM software and manage B2B customer relationships.

What Is B2B Crm?

B2B Customer Relationship Management offers a strategic approach to meet customer expectations at every stage of the B2B sales cycle so you can close deals faster and build a loyal customer base.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is an umbrella term that encompasses everything your business does to manage your relationships with customers. However, B2B companies often use B2B CRM and B2B CRM software interchangeably. While the former refers to the strategy involved in managing customer relationships, the latter refers to the tools and integrations B2B marketers use to store and access customer information like contact information, customer interactions and their purchase history.

Note: Regardless of how your company approaches B2B CRM and B2B CRM software, technology should be able to seamlessly integrate within your system and help you improve your customer relationships. Here’s why you need to deploy a B2B CRM software.

Why do you need a B2B CRM software?

B2B CRM solutions make life easier for sales teams, customer service representatives and marketing teams by offering them an end-to-end view of a customer’s journey, via features such as contact management, marketing automation, and lead scoring. This helps B2B companies keep track of customer conversations, streamline workflows and offer access to customer data across functions to effortlessly manage their customer relationships. 

Whether you’re part of an enterprise or a small business, you need the right CRM software to suit your business needs and optimize for newer opportunities. By choosing the right B2B CRM software, you will be able to better understand which of your efforts work better and which accounts add more value to your business. You can leverage this data to revise your CRM strategy from time to time and improve your one-on-one interactions with your customers.

Remember, if you’re not yet looking for ways to maximize the value that each customer gets from your company, developing a B2B CRM strategy could help you not only improve overall customer satisfaction but also take a cost-effective approach to establish a solid customer base.

Now that we understand what B2B CRM means as a process and technology, let’s dive deeper into how we can make the most of this technology.

5 tips to improve B2B Customer relationship management using B2B CRM software

Managing customer relationships isn’t always easy but deploying the right software can simplify the process. Here’s a comprehensive list of five tips you can use to manage customer relationships more effectively and drive customer success.

1. Segment your customers

Today, sales teams may be using a CRM software to store information about their interactions with individual prospects. But, a CRM system can also help B2B businesses further simplify the sales process. You can use your CRM tool to segment your customers by creating real-time customer profiles, recording and analyzing customer communications across channels like email, phone calls, chat, social media, web and offline interactions.

For example, a unified CRM app may help you learn that most of your customers share a specific need that your product is unable to meet. This presents an opportunity for you to work on your product so that it can meet customer expectations. Now, when you introduce that solution, you can be confident that it will help a large portion of your customers get more value out of their relationship with your brand.

2. Monitor customer interactions

Shifting your focus to customer retention would require you to regularly monitor customer interactions to ensure that your customers are driving value from your product/ services. Fortunately, a CRM software will let you track the customer journey for not only your customer base as a whole but each individual customer.

This would lead you to the next step where the first customer service metric you’ll want to look at is how many of your customers make it through the onboarding process. Once you have that metric, you can then go on to determine how your customers engage with your product on a regular basis. Of course, these metrics may vary from business to business.

For example, if you’re a software company, your customers are likely to use your product every day but if you’re a service-based business, your customers are likely to respond to updates and reports on a weekly or monthly basis. Regardless of the exact ways in which you measure customer engagement, you’ll want to monitor this metric regularly. The more your customers use your product, the more value they’ll see and the happier they’ll be with your brand.

Here’s a short video covering the top points that the customer success team at Freshworks follows to make sure that we remain connected with all our customers:

3. Every customer is a company

We understand that building relationships with individual contacts is beneficial but it’s important to remember that your customer is ultimately the company they work for. That company is paying the price for your services, and there may be other stakeholders who have a say in whether they continue to do so. This means that it’s in your best interest to interact with as many people from each of your clients you serve. The more you’re able to illustrate the value you provide to a company, the more likely they’d be to maintain their relationship with you.

To keep track of every person you interact with, you can create contacts in your customer list. You can also create a new company and map the required contacts under this company. Another way to manage your customer information is to import contact and company information from a CSV into your B2B CRM software. Importing customer data allows you to make bulk updates and additions to your database with ease.

You don’t want to risk your entire rapport with a company because of a single employee. You can use the ‘Companies’ feature within Freshdesk to group together users/contacts from the same organization. This will allow you to easily keep track of all correspondences with members from the same company, in one place. Now, if that employee leaves their position, you should be confident that others in their department will be able to vouch for the value you’ve provided, and would choose to continue working with you.

4. Follow up and collect customer feedback

Customer success is ultimately about helping your customers get the maximum value out of your product. And in many cases, the best way to learn how your customers can get more value from your company is to simply ask them. If you aren’t already, you may start by sending a survey to your customers and asking them a few open-ended questions about their experience with your brand.

Collecting customer feedback on a regular basis would help you get some perspective on:

• What could be better about your existing services?

• What additional services would they want you to provide?

• What are some of the customer experiences that have been confusing or frustrating?

Read through individual customer responses and look for any recurring concerns or common responses. These are the issues you’ll want to focus on first, as fixing them will have a positive impact on most of your customers.

You may collect customer feedback through built-in surveys but it’s worth your time to ask questions during regular customer interactions. For example, if a point of contact reaches out with a question, take time to ask whether they have any other concerns or any feedback they’d like to share. Giving your customers the chance to voice their opinions can lead to valuable insights you won’t find anywhere else.

5. Measure, analyze and revise your CRM strategy

One of the best ways to get insights is by digging into your customer data at every stage of the sales process. Your B2B CRM software is a repository of all the customer information you might need. While customer information is largely used by the sales teams to track their sales pipeline, you can also use it to revise your business strategy.

When you have complete access to customer data across every touch point, you can map it to marketing campaigns, email campaigns and other activities that may have resulted in each interaction. As a result, your teams will be able to attribute the success of these campaigns to the closure of a B2B sale.

Measuring and analyzing customer relationships with the help of a robust CRM strategy can help you exceed customer expectations. You would be able to customize your CRM tool using third party integrations that can fetch you deeper insights for making better decisions.

Conclusion

Building a loyal customer base is an important goal for every company, but developing a strategy for reaching this goal is often easier said than done. After all, every customer is unique and choosing the right CRM is critical to customer success, especially for service providers.

You may use your CRM to track customer journeys, learn about customer needs, and about what could be done to meet those customer expectations. In a B2B scenario, you should remember that your customers are ultimately companies and not individual people. Aim to create relationships with more than one point of contact at each company you work with, and establish your brand as an integral part of their success.

Finally, make it a priority to collect and read feedback on a regular basis. The more in touch you are with your audience, the better you’ll become at helping them succeed and improving customer retention. Don’t forget to make customer data visible to your team members to nurture customer relationships and build that loyal base of customers.

Originally published on Dec 01, 2018. Updated on May 26, 2022.