In the competitive digital landscape, there are many tools that companies use to gain an upper hand with their competition. These tools typically are used to help companies’ market and connect with potential customers and clients, as well as their existing fans and audience. One such tool among these is a CRM.
But what is a CRM? A CRM, or customer relationship management software, is used to facilitate a process that allows you to manage and optimize relationships with customers. This can mean a number of things, from providing superior customer service, to enhancing sales efforts, to helping to automate marketing efforts and even accounting and financial operations. What a CRM does for business is help them collect customer information and keep track of where they are in different stages of the customer journey.
In creating this database, businesses can benefit from having a comprehensive amount of information available streamlined in a central hub. This can be used by many different parts of the business for different purposes, but it particularly helps the sales team, the marketing team, and the customer success team in better fulfilling their roles.
For example, the sales team may want to use aggregated data of current customer to create an ideal buyer persona. They can then reach out to people digitally or via phone who fit this buyer persona, and track sales conversions of this buyer persona directly in the CRM. In contrast, a marketing team may want to segment different types of customers, both current and potential, into different customer segments in order to better serve them emails or digital ads on social media platforms.
Perhaps where a CRM can be used most effectively though is with a customer success team. When using a CRM, a customer success team can create visualized reports to see where any trouble arises during the overall customer lifecycle. In doing so, they can reach out to customer’s in order to smooth over potential issues that arise during the most precarious periods of the customer success journey. Furthermore, a customer success team can identify areas of customer churn to see where customers actually leave the company behind altogether. In doing so, they can start to establish a pattern and forecast trends of where their skills can best be used to improve the customer experience.
Of course, there are many more ways that sales teams and marketing teams can utilize CRMs as well. However, a company can only create value when sales, marketing, and customer success are all working in tandem. The best way to do this is through the use of a CRM. Fortunately, CRMs are easy to implement and often complement the existing workflow of many organizations. Using one to centralize customer data, tracking it across teams, and work in concert to sales, marketing, and customer success will most definitely improve a company’s bottom line. While a CRM is not the only tool that should be considered by a company looking to embrace the digital landscape, it is one of the tools that will give them the most immediate value and help them gain many new customers and successfully retain them.
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