What do you think a business needs to keep itself in existence? Maybe, a high-quality product or the brand name. Irrespective of what business needs to keep alive in the market, ultimately, the end goal of all the businesses are High Sales! It is the revenue that fuels the business engine, and did you know that over 86% of surveyed consumers would happily pay a brand more for richer customer experience?

Simply put, it is the customer experience that is the real product of your brand. The more supported and nourished your clients feel, the better your chance at beating your competitors! But how will you improve your customer relationship? With the help of Customer Relationship Management ( CRM), that’s how!

In this article, we will guide you on what is CRM and how you can drive more sales.

Let us first start understanding what CRM is!

As the name suggests, Customer Relationship Management ( CRM) is a tool used by companies to strategize and implement the steps required to better their relationships with their customers. CRM software can help you keep in touch with your consumers, create and track tasks as per their urgency.

So, Let’s have a clear view of CRM via an example.

Let’s say you have a publishing business and you sell your magazines to your subscribers directly, which means you have customer relationships to manage. You need to make sure your subscribers get their magazines on time every month. And you need to do so even though people’s addresses change constantly, as do their bank details, as do their subscription plans and multiple other variables. 

Here’s how CRM makes managing customer relationships easy – in fact, it makes business administration (such as updating customer details) entirely automatic. That’s beneficial when you consider most companies have dozens of products and revenue streams, and therefore several categories of ‘customer’ to manage. Your publishing outlet, for example, might sell not just to subscribers directly but to newsagents in bulk as well. The company probably sells media space to advertisers. And to advertising agencies, too. Plus, these days, publishers frequently host events as yet another income stream. 

CRM makes managing so many different customer relationships simple and helps in increasing profits. But here is the twist, customer relationship management varies.

Yes, you heard that right!

It depends on what department you’re talking to. A support team might use a CRM to manage customer tickets, while marketing teams may use the tool to analyze how consumers respond to online campaigns. When it comes to sales, CRM is used to streamline pipeline management. With a sales CRM tool, you can safely store databases of customer information.

Here are three ways how CRM can help you in driving more sales.

1- Simplify Sales

A sales CRM is a tool for managing all the contacts and interactions with prospects or customers throughout the sales process, whether it is direct or indirect between the sales representative and their leads. The tool tracks communication with prospects automatically organizes customer data, sends reminders to follow up with leads, and more.

Essentially, a sales CRM simplifies the process of lead nurturing. Both administrative tasks and data organization are automated, so you can spend less time on data entry and focus more on building meaningful relationships with prospects.

2- Control Sales Operations

When you run a business how quickly things become dysfunctional in the department, for example, salespersons spend half of the time juggling with their prospect research and cold calls to deal with management and field sales. Managers also stay busy with advising their salesperson’s performances.

To make things work daily, sales CRMs are designed as one-stop solutions. They can combine with your existing tools and communication channels, making it easy to manage all your tasks from a single, centralized platform.

This control of data creates a single source and salespersons can easily find the most accurate, up-to-date information needed to properly follow up with a lead. They can engage with prospects across all communication channels, such as email, phone, or the website’s chatbox—without having to switch between apps or browser tabs.

3- Identifying Workload

When you don’t use sales CRM, analyzing the performance issue becomes a big challenge for you. Many sales reps have to collect massive amounts of data into spreadsheets and use excel formulas so that they can make any sense. 

The perfect utilization of a sales CRM is that it handles data analysis for you. Customer information is automatically compiled into real-time “smart reports” to provide insights into how your sales department is functioning as a whole.

Why is CRM needed today?

In any business, there are two ways to increase profitability: increasing revenues or decreasing costs. As an aid to both, CRM has long been seen as a valuable business asset by organizations large and small. However, using CRM is probably more essential today than it’s ever been – following the arrival of digital communication.

It is because prospects are provided with an internet connection that has on-demand access to more information on their potential purchases than they had before. And why we’re saying this is because, according to Forbes, even prospects seeking out complex B2B solutions can be as much as 60% of the way through sales cycles before they engage with salespeople.

You can use advanced CRM software, as it’s reporting reveal that what prospects are up to online before they contact a company presents endless opportunities for both increasing revenues and reducing costs. 

The benefits of sales CRM are endless. Between automation, lead nurturing, and smart reports, your sales team will have everything they need to work more efficiently, and more productively.

Building a loyal customer base is all about developing meaningful relationships. A sales CRM automates the organizational and data analysis tasks that typically take down a sales rep’s time, so they have more time to connect with leads. 

FunnL provides meaningful relationships that can be established with sales qualified meetings and allows reps to move leads through their pipeline more quickly.

Contact FunnL to generate more sales qualified meetings!