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Attracting customers has become increasingly difficult these days, as people are generally harder to please due to the multitude of options available to them. They are smarter, price-conscious, more demanding, and less forgiving since they know products with equally good or better offers are just a Google search away. A quick browse on Amazon suggests other products similar to what you are currently viewing.
Without customers, products do not sell, and revenues do not materialize. That is why companies have now focused on sales analysis, customer segmentation, advertising, merchandising, and campaign management. They have gone beyond marketing and have now employed customer relationship management (CRM) systems in the hope of increasing the value of existing customers and the overall efficiency of the company.
In Simple Terms, What is CRM?
Jill Dyche, a former business unit president of a premier internet software company, defined CRM as a set of technology-enabled business processes that enable you to create more consistent and profitable interactions with your customers. It is a strategy used to learn more about customers' needs and behaviors to develop stronger relationships with them. Good customer relationships are at the heart of business success.
Every time a company and its customer interact, the company learns something about the customer. By capturing, sharing, analyzing, and acting upon this information, companies can better manage individual customer profitability.
CRM uses profiling, micro-segmentation, and predictive analyses to identify each customer’s figurative genetic structure. This uncovers the preferences and propensities of customers, so that they can be nudged towards optimal profitability.
Insight Forecast
According to a 2013 Gartner report1 from last year, worldwide sales of CRM software are expected to reach $36.5 billion by 2017. In fact, CRM software (on-premise and cloud-hosted or online) is already the second largest enterprise software market today after Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). Businesses will continue to increase investments in CRM solutions, fueled not only by the need to improve results but also by the need to keep up with their competitors and create a great customer experience.
How can CRM Benefit Your Business?
- Increases Sales
The best CRM software allows you to follow quality leads and reduce time wasted following prospects. Sales cycles are reduced, and win rates are improved. Moreover, you can check customer buying history to identify potential leads, upsell opportunities, or encourage repeat customers. Top CRM applications also help identify your most valuable customers, allowing you to create personalized communication or even a customer reward system to increase engagement and conversion. Furthermore, you can easily identify weak links in the sales process and address the issue promptly.
- Increases Profitability and Efficiency
Profitability is more than just increasing sales—it is creating efficient processes across your business operations to make sure sales opportunities are not lost and costs are minimized. A CRM system can act as a gatekeeper of your company's business processes, ensuring that employees use the same templates, formats, and efficient systematic procedures to perform their tasks.
- Reinforces Data Security
With CRM, confidential customer data and trade insights are kept in a centralized system instead of separate, disconnected desktops. You can set parameters so that only authorized employees can access the data while keeping a close tab on a single channel for possible breaches. In military parlance, by positioning your defensive line in a narrow channel, you reduce the superiority in numbers of the enemy, the hackers around the world.
- Attracts and Maintains Powerful Customer Relationships
CRMs will help drive sales and marketing efficiency, leading to more revenue faster. Not only will we see higher conversions and acceleration of sales velocity, but these data-driven insights will fundamentally flip the funnel. For example, instead of talking to the majority and only succeeding 20% of the time, we will see organizations focusing 80% of their time connecting with the optimal prospects. This will result not only in more powerful marketing and sales towards the right prospects but in a future where businesses are working with the right customers, making them successful, and building partnerships instead of simply accumulating profit.
The Best CRM
There are plenty of CRM solutions on the market. Deciding which option to purchase largely depends on the size and vision of your business. There is not one best CRM system—the best CRM is the one that fits the needs of your organization. The most sophisticated CRM with all the bells and whistles might not answer your business needs. In CRM, more does not always mean better.
First and foremost, ask yourself: “Why do I need CRM?” “What are my goals?” “What are my KPIs, and how much ROI do I anticipate?”
From there, evaluate the different CRM systems available on the market, and then figure out which ones fit your organization.
Sources:
1https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2013/06/18/gartner-predicts-crm-will-be-a-36b-market-by-2017/#22050bcc77e3
2https://books.google.com.ph/books?id=2E6S1_vqTKwC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
