The use of CRM tools in Business

Staying organised and methodical is not the easiest as you’d think. In your workspace, there’s always a call or an email that you have to take on and reply to, often making you drop what you’re doing and move on to the next thing. Plus, all the other distractions you face on a daily basis such as? keeping track of your daily tasks, your business contacts, priority work that requires immediate attention, and the notes that you keep in your head to attend to later feels more like a forever-lasting head burden than part of the job. We all know these types of things happen at any stage of the company hierarchy ladder but when all of these happen in the field of marketing and sales, the weight on your shoulders will be completely different to any other function.? Why? Because you have to deal with customers directly, which is the main stakeholder group given the revenue stream of most companies depends on them! This is where the idea of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) comes into play.

What is CRM?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is self-explanatory but to put it into words; it is the process by which a business handles its interaction with customers. Given the theory of CRM, we now have specific? tools aptly named CRM software. It helps you keep track of your client data, track your leads, what stage they are in the buyer’s journey, how they’re engaging with your website, sales collaterals, email content, and many more! CRMs help your work life become more? efficient and most importantly it helps your company grow!

CRMs were initially designed to empower sales teams with their day-to-day tasks of keeping track of the sales pipeline, but it can also significantly improve other aspects of your business if implemented and used correctly. Having the right CRM tool can make a huge impact in the success of even a small business, especially when it comes to nurturing leads, qualifying leads into clients, and making the current clientele into loyal high paying clients? of a business. Throughout the sales pipeline there is not a single point where it won’t be of any use to you and your company.

You don’t always come across a tool that embodies? a lot of core aspects in a business all in a single platform. A CRM is one of those tools that allows a business to run smoothly without making a huge increase? in the budget. So if you want your business to be able to do all that and help you monitor, control and engage with your prospects, a CRM could be a right solution! Let’s see how and who exactly a tool like that can help.

Who is it for?

Let’s look at the big three that help a business scale and grow - Marketing, Sales and Service.

Marketing

Information is always valuable when it comes to marketing. The more information your business has about your prospects the better you can use it for your? efforts in? targeting the right audience with right content. With a CRM, it will be easier to achieve all of that because the software can track your prospects and monitor their behaviour. For example, the CRM can track the number of views, bounce rate, retention time on a website associated with a campaign. With this information you can evaluate and understand? the tactics that work, key patterns, what materials work best and work to get the most engagement. It’s a kind of a tool that can monitor marketing performance and help you understand where to focus your efforts more effectively to get the best outcome.

A key part of the CRM is the amount of features provided together on a single platform. From form building to integrating third party advertising platforms to marketing automation, it’s all there!

Sales

We all know about the superpower that the sales team has, which is SELLING! That is where their focus and attention should be, but more often, the sales team spends a majority of their time on other tasks such as follow ups, emails, task management, data tasks etc. According to HubSpot, one sales team only spends around 30% of their time selling. This shouldn’t be and isn't the ideal case. Hence, any tool that enables and empowers a sales team to focus on selling to get the best out from them is a good tool to have, and a CRM is one of the most suitable solutions for this conundrum. A CRM software creates the best possible efficiencies that allows a sales team to use their skill and focus towards seeking, conversing, and winning? closing deals with new clients.

A CRM software can create tasks, set reminders, create templates of sequences and automate follow-ups & email campaigns so your sales team would not have to perform them manually each time. These few benefits are a few amongst many many other functionalities that a CRM can provide its users. On top of allowing them to create more space in their schedule? to focus on? other much more important tasks, it also takes care of error rates that a typical human can make. This does not only increase the efficiency of the team but also makes selling more effective.

Services

We would say the worst thing that can happen in providing service is a bad customer experience. It is something that can end a client relationship for good and further, it could tarnish the reputation of your company and make you lose future or even existing clients. Good customer service means more customer retention and the chance of getting more clients through? referrals.

In order to fulfil? customer satisfaction, keeping all necessary information at your disposal helps run the services division smoothly. This is where the use of a CRM comes into the picture.?

A CRM enables you to easily track past behaviours and monitor customers which can provide you with valuable background information which? can be very helpful when providing a client service resolution. It adds much more value and shows your clients how much you value their relationship and that you’re invested in ensuring their experience is at optimal capacity.

As you can see from the above, there’s plenty of areas where your CRM could provide an immense amount of support to your business so that it will? run much more smoothly and efficiently. Most businesses choose to invest in a CRM to help them manage, monitor and optimise their sales and marketing processes, but there are many ways a CRM could provide a user with additional benefits, many of which you might not even be aware of. Following are some ways you can start leveraging your CRM to keep your business running more smoothly.

Customer lifecycle management - This helps your business to understand where your prospects are in the conversion process. The right tool enables you to understand how to be invested in relationship building and upselling your services.

Client onboarding - We all know about the legwork that goes into acquiring a client and implementing your services. A CRM allows you to facilitate and manage this process and take off most of those time consuming manual tasks and introduce smooth workflows.

Virtual contact hub - A CRM is a great rolodex and helps you store all your contact information, like contact numbers, email addresses, company names, job titles and additional details. This way all this information will be available right at your fingertips when you need to get in touch with anyone.

GDPR compliance - ?The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) restricts companies on how to manage and store prospects data. Failure to comply with these regulations may result in fines or ban of services. With CRM software, you can ensure that all data is stored in a secure place, helping your company to remain in compliance with GDPR.

Regardless of the size of your business, if you are not making the use of a CRM in your company you are missing out on huge opportunities to reduce costs and a lot of feasible benefits. By this point of the article , you may have come to the? conclusion where you actually want to consider a good CRM tool for your business. That’s GREAT NEWS! So how would you find out what CRM fits your business the best? Not to worry. Here are a few pointers to keep in mind when you consider a CRM tool.

• Your budget - How much are you willing to spend?
• Your team - Who would be the ones to use it? Or is it for everyone?
• Technical support - How is the customer support from CRM the platform?
• Features - What features do you actually want to implement your CRM in?
• Integration - Can you integrate tools currently used to? it?

With all that said, look for a CRM platform that is built with the right features that best suits your business for your business to grow. Implementing a CRM for? your business will guarantee a positive and significant effect on your performance.?

How do we know?

Well, what is the point if we sell the idea of implementing a CRM without sharing our experience at Rocket with you!?

We are a major fan of the CRMs, more specifically, HubSpot, which we think is the leading platform at the moment. It has allowed us to run all processes of our sales pipeline efficiently and effectively. Majority of the tasks that we used to do manually, now have been automated. Another highlighted benefit we gained was the ability to track and monitor all our campaigns on a single platform. That’s just two and we can go on and on about the benefits we manage to get.

The best thing is HubSpot has a great range of services they offer, starting with Free to Professional to Enterprise level. If you are not very certain but want to try it out, please go ahead and sign up for their free package. Even the free version grants you access to a ton of features for you to try out and even if you don't want to upgrade, there is nothing stopping you from enjoying all the benefits that comes with the free package.?

We,? ourselves, started as free users of the HubSpot Platform? and now we have progressed to become an Official Partner of HubSpot. Hence, if you want to know more about how we can help you implement? a CRM to your business and what specific benefits you can gain from it, we are always open to have a chat with you! Please do not hesitate to reach out to us!