Customer relationships are at the centre of any successful business. Regardless of their size, more organizations started using customer relationship management tools. Even though the positive impact of CRMs has been proved many times, many companies still hesitate to adopt such technology. In this article, we will explore how CRM increases your business's revenue.
These days, customers don't want to feel like a number but expect to be treated like individuals with unique interests. Therefore, there is a challenge for companies to make sure to earn customers' trust and maintain close relationships over extended periods.
Not too long ago, businesses used to rely on extensive excel spreadsheets to track all of their activities and metrics. As you can imagine, it would be tough to ensure everything stays on track: some of the data would be lost in the mountains of documents, and some just forgotten. All that changed as we moved to a digital age. As the need for sophisticated tools for keeping records of customers grew, CRMs entered the scene.
In a nutshell, CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is an integrated solution that lets organizations manage their complex customer relationships and enables sales teams to focus on selling. Traditional CRM systems were created to store customer data and drive leads primarily. Eventually, technology evolved, and now CRM systems are all-in-one solutions used to track customer interactions, analyse and store data, deliver insights and automate processes. CRM aims to streamline operations and ease customer data collection that businesses can use to increase productivity. That significantly helps businesses to create customized experiences for loyal and prospective customers.
The benefit of CRM for an organization's revenue increase is undeniable. Still, many companies wonder if investing in a CRM solution would be worth it. Most concerns come from the question of its ability to generate revenue. The answer is obviously – Yes, it can!
Here, we will explore how you can increase revenue using CRM software and why it might be a great solution.
Are your salespeople meeting their targets? What are the experiences of your customers with the sales process? What information do your prospects need to move forward with you?
The sales process can often feel chaotic and overwhelming. You need to constantly monitor your sales if you want to maintain long-lasting relationships. Also, you need to know how long prospects stay in the funnel and identify when they have stalled out or left in their buyer journey. Sales are not just about completing one sales lifecycle after another. They are also about getting an insight into your prospect and customers.
Using a CRM solution helps you keep an eye on the sales cycle and fixes any flaws in your sales methods. CRM supervises each stage of the process, helping you navigate the sales cycle and giving valuable insights. Without CRM, it is common for a customer to get lost or be forgotten, but by using CRM, you can collect and analyse customers' details and deliver personalized marketing communication. Since CRM helps drastically accelerate the sales cycle, you can expect your revenue to grow quickly.
Selling to repeat customers is always more accessible and affordable than scouting for new ones. However, maintaining a loyal customer base requires more than offering a good product. What it takes to earn a customer's trust is communication. But how do you go about that communication? Customers tend to respond best to a personalized, meaningful and relevant approach. Another thing to consider is to ensure that contact is regular and that you don't leave your customers on hold for long periods. It is reported that up to 48 per cent of customers want to spend time with a business that personalizes their user experience.
But how do you go about monitoring your customers? Regardless of what industry are you part of, it means tracking behaviours and needs that can give you insight for following through and improving future sales. It can be everything from monitoring their purchasing history, complaints, demographics, interest or communication channels they prefer to use. Seventy-six per cent of customers expect consistent interactions across departments. In 2020, 52% of customers expected offers always to be personalized — up from 49% in 2019.
Tracking your customers manually can quickly become chaotic, and you will inevitably lose track of some of them in the process.
This is where CRM comes into play. CRM collects and analyses customer details and helps create personalized communication with each customer. It also helps to ease the transfer of customers from one salesperson or department to another without starting from scratch. This allows for quick and meaningful communication and makes customers feel valued, which results in loyalty and revenue increase.
One of the significant benefits of CRM solutions is the ability to integrate multiple processes into one solution. Since it allows for integrating workflows from many departments, it can significantly increase employee productivity.
CRMs also eliminate time-consuming, redundant tasks and help avoid multiple employees engaging in the same task. This improves overall communication between departments, minimizing unnecessary phone calls or emails and creating a seamless process for customers who may be waiting for information or answer. The ability to integrate different departments significantly increases employee productivity and satisfaction.
An increase in employee productivity is also crucial for sales representatives who historically spent only a fraction of their work hours on actually selling. Before CRM, workdays were taken up by administrative tasks, such as qualifying leads, data entry, and cost-benefit analysis, leaving little time for customers. CRM streamlines many of these processes, leaving sales reps with more time to spend with customers, forming relationships, and ultimately selling products to drive revenue.
Whether you are a small-scale company or a corporation, you have different people working on different things. Still, in the end, all those different tasks serve one common goal. The process of achieving these common goals plans can get a bit disorganized if there is not some integration.
Integrating your CRM system with the rest of your departments will give you significant benefits for every department.
For example, you'll be able to quickly transfer and view customer-related data between sales, marketing, finance, and production. You can automate the ordering process and find out what aspects of your business are most profitable.
You'll boost revenue by improving customer service, gaining more financial insight into sales, optimizing production, and reducing internal manual processes.
We know every company is not the same: goals, workflows, and departments are different from company to company. Here, it would be best to look for a customizable CRM solution, like Live, that allows you to choose features your business and customer base needs. Choose your prefered communication channels, analyze and use AI to predict business trends so you make data-backed decisions.
We talked about how CRMs can be used to delight existing customers. Knowing that CRM doesn't just manage your current customers is essential. Customer relationship technology also helps target new customers. Connecting with prospects on social channels enables your team to attract new leads and easily share information customers need to make buying decisions.
By letting companies filter their leads by their demographics and interests, such as life stage, CRM facilitates targeted marketing to potential customers. This enables businesses to market directly to relevant populations, increasing the odds of winning new customers. Plus, by integrating different communication platforms, companies can reach customers who may not have considered shopping, potentially enticing them to consider new products or services.
With the proper CRM solution, you can use built-in engagement and customer relationship tools to boost your sales and increase revenue.
Another thing that helps CRMs to increase revenue is process automation.
Every business manually handles a lot of repetitive but necessary tasks. Whether a simple task or a series of complex activities, you can use the CRM automated features to manage these repetitive processes. With workflow automation, you make these processes more efficient and your staff more productive.
Customize your CRM program to send automated reports or forward automated emails to the right person. With CRM's handling of tedious and repetitive tasks, businesses can focus on selling and scaling up their sales operations.
Using advanced AI technology, CRMs are taking over various business features for a better customer experience. Chatbots and customer self-service options prompt quicker problem solving for improved client satisfaction. Happier customers can lead not only to repeat purchases but to referrals and good reviews, which can drive your revenue.
Plus, your CRM solution can increase the time to revenue once the contract is signed by automating onboarding and billing processes, particularly post-sale. That means the money is in the bank sooner, and more cash flow is available.
CRM tools help automate tedious manual tasks. Rather than looking for contact information, entering data, or hunting for past customer service emails, your team has more time to engage with customers directly.
Automating repetitive tasks and processes frees up valuable time. With CRM tools, time-consuming manual tasks no longer pull attention away from engaging with prospective leads and nurturing connections with existing customers. Higher productivity means happier consumers and increased revenue.
As you see, a CRM is a powerful tool that can be a game changer for your business. It can help you collaborate, integrate, automate and utilize your resources and increase revenue.
Sales practices should always reflect who you are as a business. This means making sure you follow through when it comes to customer expectations as well as the expectations of your employees.
Adopting modern technology will attract highly qualified leads and convert them accordingly. This means that your business will be able to enjoy more revenue. Your CRM system should provide compelling insights and allow for more innovative marketing.
CRM tools are proven for customer retention, which results in higher revenue. Research by the Harvard Business Review concluded that around a 5% decrease in your consumer defection rate could improve your profitability or sales by 25%-85%.
Now, after discussing how a CRM can increase your revenue, the question remains: What is the best CRM for you? Well, it will depend on your needs as a business. Features you deem essential will correspond with your current and future needs directly. As you gain more and more customers, the CRM features you may need are going to expand. Let's say your current customers use phone calls as their preferred communication channel. However, you see potential in different demographic that prefers social media. Well, you can have both. Customizable CRMs, like Live, allow you to adapt your tools according to your needed features while giving you great support to excel in your future endeavours.
Learn more about how the Live product family can help you support and improve your customer experience strategy.
