As an SME or established company in the new digital era, there are endless opportunities to scale your business, from paid advertising on social media to search engine optimisation.
However, this can be a detriment to some businesses, as they feel as though they have too much on their plate and end up falling behind because they’re not doing enough on each platform.
Yet, the idea of CRM platforms being accessible for all businesses to use nowadays brings a new wave of ability to modern-day businesses. In this blog post, we’ll unravel exactly why companies are beginning to use CRM systems in their daily tasks.
What is CRM in simple words?
CRM stands for customer relationship management and is a tool that your business can use to better understand and connect with its customers. It not only helps companies organise and manage customer information, but it can store all of your interactions and transactions in one place.
By using highly rated CRM software, you will be able to track your customer preferences, purchase history, and communication history on your content management system or marketing campaigns to provide personalised services and improve customer service.
In simple words, CRM is like your own personal digital assistant that helps companies build stronger relationships with customers by keeping all customer-related information organised and easily accessible to you and your marketing team/sales reps at all times.
Why do companies use CRM systems?
So why do companies use CRM systems? No matter the size of a company, a CRM tool offers a multitude of enticing benefits. These include:
It enhances customer service capabilities
As you begin to grow your business, you will notice that no matter whether you’re a product- or service-based company, it will be challenging to keep up with all the requests, queries, and issues.
Not only will a CRM system help track and resolve customer issues more efficiently, but using it will lead to improved customer satisfaction and loyalty across the board. This automated process can save you the hassle of dealing with the same customer interactions over and over again and give you the freedom to focus on other aspects of the business.
It offers detailed customer insights
Although customer relationship management may come across as just a customer service tool, there are many other functions that it can provide within your organisation. One of them is detailed customer insights due to the repository of customer data within the centralised hub.
This enables you to gain valuable insights into customer preferences, behaviours and needs when making decisions on how you can attract, convert, and retain existing customers through your future and ongoing marketing campaigns. Without this, optimisation would be a guessing game, but now you have data-driven insights to guide you.
It enables you to automate tasks within your team
Although you, as a business owner, may have mindless and repetitive tasks that take up large chunks of your day, team members experience the exact same issues. However, if you begin to use a CRM system, this allows you to sit down with your staff and streamline your tasks.
Whether this is the system taking tasks off you and your team completely or you assigning tasks using the CRM functionality, the possibilities are endless with how you can format your work.
Sales and marketing efficiency
Along with CRM tools that allow you to automate tasks within your team, your sales and marketing pipeline can be massively improved. Each feature will essentially streamline sales processes, track your leads, and enable you to produce targeted marketing campaigns.
Nurturing leads can be extremely difficult if you’re running the sales and marketing procedures on your own. A CRM system can increase conversion rates and revenue by staying on top of the customer lifecycle at all times.
It offers forecasting and reporting features
The conversion rate, retention rate, and scalability are no doubt assisted by the power of your CRM system, and it is no different with the reporting and forecasting features included. A powerful CRM tool with these components enables you to analyse data, predict trends, and generate reports to aid your decision-making.
For example, if you see that an email marketing campaign is performing well using the reporting features, you’ll be able to dissect exactly why it is working and implement that into future campaigns—it all becomes one cycle of vast improvements.
How do you know if you need a CRM system?
Now that you understand the underlying reason for using CRM systems, you may be wondering if you qualify for needing this within your company. Let’s take a look at the main potential pain points you could be experiencing without this tool in your business:
- Failing to reply to customer enquiries, issues and problems
- You’re beginning to miss follow-ups with potential customers or clients
- Wasting time on manual and repetitive tasks within your day-to-day responsibilities
- The customer experience is beginning to suffer due to sporadic communication
- All of your customer data is scattered wildly and is hard to keep track of
- You’ve plateaued when it comes to scaling your business any further
- Your sales cycles seem to be lasting too long
If you recognise several of these signs within your business operations, it may be a strong indication that adopting a CRM tool could benefit your company.
Closing thoughts
Companies are beginning to see the power of CRM systems like HubSpot, and are reaching out for help in this space. If you’re interested in adopting a robust CRM system within your business, Fuelius are your online specialists and have over 25 years of experience helping online businesses flourish.
To get in touch with our team, you can book a discovery call below, and any questions you have about potentially introducing a CRM within your company will be answered with high regard. We look forward to hearing from you!
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