CRMs (or Customer Relationship Management systems, to be specific) have never been more important than they are now. As technology evolves, our customers expect us to know them and to provide them relevant content. CRMs can make this easier! Here’s a quick overview of the top functions that CRMs enable and a list of common platforms that you can browse to get started.
Sales Organization and Automation
Sales team members are the heaviest users of CRMs. The tool allows them to view all of their leads, deals, and customers in one place. Successful companies implement workflows that automate the delivery of new and important leads to salespeople for fast follow up. Common tools that salespeople use in CRMs:
- Task Management: Reminders and to-do’s
- Event Management: Meeting schedules
- Email Deployment: Sending one-on-one emails with visibility of prospect opens
- Lead Management: Updating and tracking information on leads
- Call Logging: Recording calls and outcomes
- Deal Management: Tracking sales opportunities through stages and managing a forecasted revenue pipeline
- Customer and Account Management: Tracking customer information
Customer Service
Organizations that use CRMs often also include customer service in their ecosystem. This enables customer service to access any pertinent sales information in the customer’s history. This also exposes sales to any open customer service issues that they might want to be aware of. CRMs enable templated communication, use of knowledge bases, and AI to streamline customer service communications. All communication is tracked to allow for advanced reporting on common service problems to support teams, with continuous improvement initiatives.
Marketing and Automation
Data collected in CRMs allows marketing to segment users for more targeted marketing programs. For example, a marketer may want to send a campaign to prospects who have a CCRP certification and the title of practice owner—this is possible with a CRM.
CRMs can also connect to marketing automation platforms (and some contain their own) that enable advanced automation development, such as customer onboarding sequences or prospect journeys triggered based on meeting behavior or demographic criteria.
Campaign ROI Tracking
Marketers also use CRMs to track campaign success by attributing prospects to a specific marketing campaign. Ultimately, sales converts deals associated with the campaign and sells products, which count as sales towards the campaign. Costs are also tracked in the campaign for true ROI evaluation.
Business Intelligence
Reports delivered from CRMs can provide invaluable business intelligence, including information such as top marketing revenue generating channels, top ROI campaigns, territory-specific performance data on sales staff, customer service insights, campaign performance metrics (eg, email opens, sales cycle lengths), and much more!
Choosing a CRM
If you’re ready to get started, here are the top CRMs worth investigating!
- Salesforce
- HubSpot
- Freshsales
- Insightly
Best of luck on your CRM journey!