Dave Lavender, Executive Chronicles | Have Customers? Here’s What You Need To Know About CRM | Using a CRM or Customer relationship management piece of software to organize, track, and drive sales in your company is one of the larger benefits that you could add to your company. According to salesforce.com, one of the leading vendors of CRMS in the world, when you switch to using a CRM for your sales work, you can expect to achieve close to a 37 percent increase in sales.
With that type of benefit, it is hard to imagine companies that can afford it saying anything other than yes to making a changeover.
Here are some other very good reasons to look at switching over to a CRM app in your firm:
Sales people can stay organized anywhere:
Since the late 1980’s, there have been sales contact databases running on operating systems that were designed to work with laptops that were taken out on the road. Sales managers that jumped on the digital bandwagon early were able to leverage this new power to out-strategize their competitors.
It wasn’t until the past decade, however, that mature CRM application software was available online that made it so that people who had businesses that were out in the field and needed real-time synchronization could share their data across one application interface.
Another difference that the past decade has brought when it comes to the actual organizational strength of the CRM application is that today’s systems often include big data analysis tools that crunch your company numbers and provide you with an instant financial reporting picture that makes it easier to manage a company.
Lead management:
There is an old saying that in sales you start out with a funnel of opportunities and the sales that you want to or are ready to close come out the bottom of the funnel. The process in between is known as lead management.
The idea for salespeople is to communicate effectively to the client about the client’s needs. In some companies, this means ensuring that the client’s technical requirements are going to be met by the product or service sold by your salespeople. In other companies, salespeople are actually tasked with creating a need for purchase in their assigned client base.
For a CRM app to be effective, you should have an organized or customizable lead management section that is designed well enough so that your salespeople will actually use it. The more you have buy-in to the lead management portion of your CRM application, the better you will be at sales forecasting and the better your sales results will be.
Data integration:
Have you ever wondered how people know so much about you when you visit a business? Business intelligence firms have created sophisticated databases that cut across industries.
With a good CRM application you can port data in that describes your customer’s habits without gettings so much data that they become annoyed. One good example of a company that used a CRM wrong is a winery supply house in California that purchased software industry data on its clients. The problem is that many of its clients that were now wine but formerly software had their software competitors write the information that was in the database. So their attempt at ‘federation’ of data was met with a lot of hostility.
If you instead use business intelligence firms that take the time to gauge psychological reactions to the inclusion of certain types of data, you should be able to bring good information into your CRM app from the outside and augment your salespeople in the field.
Getting a CRM app that is available online for all your employees is one of the best decisions you can make. Ensuring that you have it set up right, that it contains solid lead management capability, and that you can rely upon it for data integration will make your sales team’s efforts stronger.
