Nurture Customer Relationships using Out of Box CRM features

In today’s world, an ever-increasing top line is what companies focus on. They equip their sales teams with fancy tools and software to encourage exponential growth. The usage of these tools however remain highly compartmentalized and optimizing the usage which will give them true growth in the form of richer customer relationships is truly utopian idea.

In the past, relationships were made to make a sale and that was the end of it. But today, in the age of customer, a relationship begins when a sale is made. Companies have realized the importance of customer lifetime value.

So to put it simply, sales is just the first step. There is a lot that happens post sales that will eventually drive the customer towards loyalty and advocacy. This hyper competitive time demands innovative ways to differentiate and build relationships post sales

Sure, 0 to 1 sounds exciting and might open the doors to completely unexplored territories in your business, with the paucity of time and resources it is sometimes a good idea to go from 1 to n. One way to do this is to leverage the features available in CRM tools and technologies that companies have invested in . Here are two ways you can boost customer relationships that are available in any popular CRM software albeit at a premium price.

Leveraging Analytics

Most CRMs today have inbuilt analytics capabilities, and this is a good starting point to understand buying trends of your customers. All it requires is some investment in analyzing your target market, their buying patterns, your competitors and your revenues. The results can give you ideas on where to invest and what stage of the sales cycle.

For eg. If you own a car dealership, is the sale over once the car is sold or will your customer come back to you for those small upgrades or even for a second car. More interesting, can you predict when your customer is ready for the second car?

Using Artificial Intelligence

Today’s customers are barraged with a variety of choices. The results are often disgruntled and confused customers because they are not sure what is good for them or they end up making some impulse buying decisions. So how do we guide customers to conversion without being pushy?

Answer is in understanding the customer persona and making guided selling suggestions available as out of box features of most popular CRM leading to effective upselling and greater AOV. These are often powered by AI as the system learns by itself and make suggestions as it encounters more possibilities and situations each day. Can your Sales Rep be guided on what to sell based on market trends?