To Grow Your Business, Invest in CRM Software First for a Great Customer Experience

Your business can grow without Marketing but will die without Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. Exceptional customer experience is the key to cultivating customers for life and successful business growth.

This article will help you understand exactly how marketing as a concentration fits in with CRM, and why you need a CRM to make the most of your marketing efforts.

Additionally, it will cover what you should be looking for in a CRM system, and exactly how it will benefit your customers and your business.

Let’s Talk Marketing

Digital Marketing is all the rage these days. Inbound marketing, social media marketing, SEO, PPC, the list goes on…

Then there is your website, content, email campaigns, blogs, videos, and much more. Marketing is always evolving so that even the ‘experts’ have a hard time creating and maintaining the best strategy.

I should know – I have spent tens of thousands of dollars with marketing agencies without significant results to show for it.

This year, I spent hundreds of hours learning and testing best practices. I have utilized platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, Medium, and many more.

Closing business with Marketing is Harder than we Think

The investment of time and effort does not guarantee success.  All your hard work, effort, and money can go to waste if the right strategies are not applied.

Marketing, when done right, connects with and engages people who are looking for the products and services you offer.  Success means a steady influx of new leads.

The thing to remember is that these are leads – and converting them to business is a different endeavor.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software

Another tool for sales and marketing teams is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.

CRM helps businesses manage and improve lead conversion, customer relationships, and customer service. It is an essential tool for managing leads and closing opportunities. It is also critical in onboarding customers and fulfilling their needs.

Check out our free beginner’s guide to CRM systems here!

Exceptional Customer Experience Delivered via the Best CRM Creates Customers for Life

With the right CRM, excellence in upselling, reselling, and customer service is possible. It helps your users to stay organized, efficient, and effective. Consider:

• Customers for life bring revenue and profit growth opportunities for life.
• Repeat business is a significant source of growth and profit for any company.
• Upselling to current customers bears fruit with less investment of time and effort.
• Trust, rapport, and institutional knowledge earned from serving customers makes future sales less work.
• It takes 5-6X less effort and expense to sell to a current customer as opposed to a new prospect.

Generating new opportunities does have to not cost thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of marketing. These opportunities are won by providing exceptional customer experience.

Another benefit of providing exceptional customer experience is referrals, which have a high close rate. Referred leads are warm introductions. They help remove the barrier to entry in meeting decision-makers and assist in gaining vital inside information about the job. CRM helps manage relationships with referred prospects to win opportunities.

Networking is another source of new business that does not cost much; it brings social and intellectual benefits as well. CRM enables management and nurturing of network relationships.

A company can grow and thrive without a significant marketing effort. But it cannot succeed in the long term without a robust CRM.

CRM is a must for every business.

When investing in marketing, your CRM has to be ready to nurture and close the opportunities created.

Any CRM won’t do; it has to be the right CRM for your business. The best CRM supports well planned and executed business processes enable business growth for life and create organic sources of new business.

Surviving and thriving are hard without investing time, energy, and resources in the right CRM.

Features of the Right CRM

Let’s take a few minutes to review some essential elements of the right CRM for your business:

1. Collect, secure, and store leads, prospect, opportunities, customer, product, vendor, contracts, and other vital customer data
   Every business is different, and each one has different needs. Any CRM that limits how many contacts, fields, or processes you can create is not scalable, whereas the right CRM serves your business needs without arbitrary limitations.
2. Provide various integrations to enable automatic data update and entry from different areas of business or online data warehouses
   Data entry is time-consuming. Today, the average salesperson spends one hour a day doing data entry. That’s one hour less time they are spending closing business.  The right CRM allows you to integrate with other business applications and your website to automatically update data. It helps the sales team work efficiently.
3. Manage and report on lead-to-close sales cycles for an increase in business
   Reporting provides vital information to decision-makers, and Business Process Automation (BPA) helps save time and avoid mistakes in the sales cycle.  The best CRM has robust reporting and extensive options to automate business processes.
4. Scalable as your business grows and evolves
   Today, businesses evolve at a faster rate than ever. Tools supporting enterprises have to be scalable and adaptable. CRM is no exception.
5. Readily available and reliable support, training, and service providers
   Support, user training, and other specialized services help keep CRM relevant and useful over time. The right CRM has a healthy amount of options available for support and other services.

Conclusion

All the hype around marketing these days would have some believe that it is the only way to generate good quality leads to grow a business.  In reality, it is a complicated, time-consuming, and expensive exercise.

Investing time, effort, and money into the right CRM for your business will bring better ROI, long-lasting growth, and loyalty of your customers.

Your CRM has to fit your business needs. Choose carefully and then commit to making the culture shift to support it being used. Successful companies often say: ‘If it is not in the CRM, it did not happen.’

Want to learn more about all of the different CRM solutions and discuss which one might best for you? Drop us a line via the form below!

We’d love to chat with you!