Why you need a CRM

At some point, all companies need to enter new markets or introduce new products. But if you are struggling to keep up with the business you are generating now, you might need to invest in an integrated CRM solution. A CRM can sort, analyze, and prioritize your sales leads so that your sales team can focus on the opportunities that are likely to close and provide accurate answers to customers—quickly and efficiently—and your customer service team has the information they need for upselling and cross-selling.

If you cannot locate all your customer data points, all you can do is guess when it comes time to build your ideal customer profile. Not only that, you will have no visibility into your sales team’s activities. To find out this information, you will have to hold more status meetings, taking your salespeople away from customers and exacerbating the issue.

If your customer service reps are reacting to customer issues and not proactively working with customers, it’s time to invest in a CRM tool for your service team, one that can give you a unified view of your customer so that reps can offer spectacular service. Your CRM should also provide the following:

Since a good CRM can hold all types of information, it can be the rallying point for different teams. A lack of cooperation between departments is the source of many customer pain points. They’re forced to repeat themselves. Promises made to them slip through the cracks. No one seems to know their history. Without smooth cooperation between all teams, customers will leave.

Aligning business processes between sales, customer service, marketing, and even some back-office roles (such as billing, inventory, or logistics) is a tricky affair. But if all the components of a CRM share a common data model, all employees can access, use, and add data. They can work collaboratively and share insights, leads, issues, and purchase history. When information is shared across teams, productivity and efficiency skyrocket, data silos disappear, and your entire company appears as one cohesive unit to the customer. You have just built a data-driven organization.

You don't want your best customers to feel unappreciated, but that is hard if you don't know who those customers are. The right CRM tool can identify them so that any customer-facing employee can acknowledge them, provide the right incentives, and nurture them to increase customer loyalty.

CRM solutions can help keep track of contacts within a business, to allow both sales and marketing teams to personalize communication. Good CRM solutions can supplement their account and contact data through third-party data sources so that all information is complete and up to date. So, if a contact has moved to a new job, your sales, service, and marketing teams know about it, allowing them to maintain and rebuild these important relationships.

Incomplete and dirty data is a big issue for brands worldwide. Good CRM solutions automatically flow second- and third-party account and contact information into your CRM system, filling in missing information that salespeople left out and intelligently removing duplicates.

If reports are still produced by downloading data into spreadsheets, they are taking way too much time to create and are probably inaccurate. Inaccurate reports lead to faulty planning and forecasting. While time-consuming administrative tasks keep your sales team from doing what they should be doing—selling. A good CRM system keeps data in one centrally located, easily accessible place, making accurate, real-time reporting and forecasting easy.

You need service on a product you've purchased from a company you’ve done business with before. You even registered the product. When you call the customer support line, the representative has no idea who you are, what you've purchased, or when the purchase took place. You now have to go through the tedious process of supplying information that should be readily available to the representative, such as a model or serial number (which turns out to be hard to access). Not only are you wasting valuable time providing this information to a company who should have made it accessible, you feel that you're not very important to them since they seem to know nothing about you. Even though you did receive the service needed, you look hard at the competition the next time you think about purchasing from that company.

You make that support call. By merely taking down your name and verifying who you are, the representative has your entire purchase and service history available and treats you like the valued customer you are. Even with a product issue, this type of personal treatment will keep you coming back.

CRM supports the second type of customer experience. Every interaction based on CRM creates an opportunity for your customer to have a more personal, compelling experience. It's also an opportunity for you to build brand equity, improve satisfaction, and make more sales. And that’s how you create customer loyalty and increase revenue.