A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution that’s ideally suited to your business enables you to delight your prospects at every turn, getting into their mindset, anticipating their needs and delivering to convert fresh leads into loyal, long-term customers.
Here, our Senior Sales Executive Sara Tatam shares her insights on the relationship between CRM and successful sales, the common lead-losing cracks in sales funnels, and how the right CRM solution can smooth them over.
The traditional idea of a sales funnel is a fairly simple breakdown of opportunities and leads, along with where they’ve reached on their customer journey. Now, though, businesses need more nuanced information to stand out from competitors, convert leads and nurture loyal customers.
Disparate systems — Excel sheets for potential leads, a finance system for quotes and a form system for opportunities, say — are too clunky to enable you to provide the streamlined, informed service your customers expect. Your sales and customer service teams can lose their way in the maze, missing key opportunities to convert and deliver. And the last thing you want is your marketing communications to land in the wrong inboxes, feel like spam and risk leads unsubscribing.
With a tailored CRM solution, though, your teams can pool insights on leads, prospects, customers and opportunities in a single location, accessible company-wide. The right CRM opens and facilitates your internal and external communication channels, naturally and intuitively, in the way your business needs.
With a single source of truth for sales and marketing to refer to, both teams can align their strategies to maximise insights and potential success. Sales can adapt their strategies based on the latest marketing campaigns; marketing can track campaign impact through sales results to inform future efforts; the two teams can mutually benefit from each other’s work via easily sharing the latest information.
If you’re not at this stage yet, you’re certainly not alone! 59% of businesses feel they lack the right data to improve marketing campaigns and sales pipelines. CRM is often the key to unlocking this improved communication, which extends beyond sales and marketing, by the way. Integrating all your departments into a customised CRM system means you can align efforts to delight your customers whenever they interact with your company, from lead conversion to product delivery and invoicing.
Likewise, enabling all your departments to access customer information via the same, up-to-date platform is crucial for minimising churn.
Let’s say, for example, that a customer purchases from you once a month. Then, for some reason, 50 days go by and they haven’t made a purchase. With your sales, marketing, account management and customer services teams all using the same CRM system, their actions and objectives can be integrated so that the right people are notified when this customer misses their regular purchase. When the account manager then looks into the details such as last engagement with the contact, they know they should pick up the phone and give the customer a call — perhaps with a well-timed, tailored offer for them.
This proactive approach, fuelled by a consolidated, cross-department view of your customers, helps your clients feel noticed and appreciated, reducing churn and supporting your business to deliver the optimal customer experience you’re aiming for.
“The right CRM opens and facilitates your internal and external communication channels, naturally and intuitively, in the way your business needs.”
– Sara Tatam, Senior Sales Executive, Provident CRM
Every business is unique, of course, but I’ll share the top 3 reasons for lead loss, in my experience:
1. Lack of communication between sales and marketing
Research shows 29% of companies admit their sales-marketing communication is poor and 21% don’t share data at all. Integrated CRM can resolve that, with customised interfaces providing both teams with the information they need from the same updated source of truth.
2. Manual inputs cause mistakes, delays and friction
Most often, poor sales-marketing communication isn’t due to lacking motivation to make it happen; it’s because outdated systems mean time-consuming manual updates are the only way to share information.
These manual updates are error-prone and tough to stay on top of — a nightmare for busy, fast-paced sales roles where it’s vital to have the latest information on prospects at your fingertips. Instead, your sales teams need a CRM solution that helps them craft a bespoke approach to leads while making their work life easier. So what does that look like?
Overall, automation has the potential to create a far more rewarding work experience for customer-facing teams. With the intelligent insights and prompts they need to focus their time and energy on leads that are more likely to convert, motivation to engage and conversions themselves can soon generate a virtuous cycle!
3. Too many fields, too many clicks
I often speak with clients struggling with a CRM system that’s become a chore, not an asset. Their salespeople just don’t want to use it; they feel like they have to but it’s become overly complicated and is no longer benefitting them in any way.
This is far too common among CRM software users: 76% say their biggest frustration with CRM is it’s too complex, unintuitive and can’t be customised. Implemented right, however, your CRM system can be the total opposite. Automations and strategically-selected fields mean your internal teams can use it rapidly and intuitively, making their work more efficient rather than weighing them down.
A bespoke CRM solution helps to make your employees’ lives easier by eliminating time-consuming manual updates and allowing them more time to engage with leads in a meaningful way.
1. Less is more with CRM: Keep things simple and effective
Great CRM shouldn’t just respond to what your customers expect from you at each stage of interaction. It should also be intuitive and performance-enhancing for your internal teams. It should help them easily enter the information they need on prospects, receive timely alerts and exceed customer expectations with a proactive approach.
We help clients take a step back and reassess what they need from their CRM to make this happen, decluttering and simplifying for success.
2. Map your customer journey: Reverse-engineer to identify drop-off points
Whatever CRM stage our clients are at, we work to understand what their goals are inside-out and map the internal processes they’ll use to get there.
Because we’re able to view these with fresh eyes, we often help our clients identify prospect drop-off points they didn’t know they had, then strategise to bridge those gaps.
3. Start with the end in mind: What input data will you need for useful analytics?
Your CRM system is only as valuable as the information inside it — it’s a cliché but it’s true! Useful reports are based on strategic input data, so we help clients define what they need their CRM solution to track. In my experience, priority insights include:
With clients’ reporting needs guiding our implementation from the start, we can ensure their CRM fields best serve their business roadmap. At Provident CRM, the solutions we work with are easily customisable through a user-friendly interface, without the need of a developer
CRM’s diversity and adaptability are why I love doing what I do — I’ve worked with plumbers, real estate agents, local government councils, charities… each use case is different and I can help in 99% of them thanks to the flexibility of the solutions we work with. For every client, the Provident CRM team leverages our experience across a wide range of sectors, tailoring it to clients’ unique needs to empower them to delight their own customers.
To find out more about how to choose the right CRM solution that can accelerate your business growth, don’t hesitate to contact our team.
