By Jessica Day – Senior Director, Marketing Strategy, Dialpad
In business, very few things come in more black-and-white than sales. You’re either making them, or not.
In this environment, the tools that you use to carry out your work need to be similarly simple and efficient. This is where CRM (customer relationship management) software can come in handy..
What Is CRM?
Before we take a look at the why we need to make sure we’re all clear on the what. There’s no point in analysing why a CRM is so fundamental to your business if you don’t know what it is.
Simply put, CRM software is a tool that hosts a lot of data relevant to your sales team. It is a place for you to store details about potential and current leads, data on sales that have happened, and information about past interactions. Expanded across different departments, it also allows for proactive customer service and progressive marketing campaigns.
Now that we’re all clear on what CRM is, let’s share some thoughts on why it is proving so crucial for so many organisations.
1. Time Management
First and foremost, CRM is a tool that allows sales teams to better manage their time. By reducing the time wasted looking through more difficult-to-use data storage systems, CRM allows team members to arrive at conclusions and make decisions about how to proceed in a more timely manner.
It, therefore, allows salespeople more time to do what they do best: talk to their customers. They have all the information they need right at their fingertips, and can refer back to it with ease throughout the call. Customers love personalisation, and CRM helps your agents excel.
2. Customer Insight
Not only does CRM software provide a quick way to access information, it means that information is incredibly comprehensive. By centralising the intelligence of the entire sales wing, it provides companies with the best opportunity possible to maintain comprehensive customer records.
As a means with which to gain insight into customer behaviour, and a tool to help you with how to improve customer experience, it simply doesn’t get better than that. With this tool in place, agents can start calls with a clear picture of who their customer is, what their past interactions have involved, and how to capture their interest.
Understanding this information can help your agents convert customers to a sale. However, that’s not the only benefit – if they’re not immediately interested, you still have more data to add to your CRM for future interactions.
3. Cost Savings
You might be thinking: okay, so this CRM software is great because it enables a sales team to work more efficiently than they would otherwise be able to. That’s great, but it must cost a ridiculous amount, right?
Luckily, the answer is no! Many CRM and CRM integrations operate on a SaaS basis, meaning monthly fees and no infrastructure investment required. Not to mention, that it can boost your revenue and help you hit your sales quota, so that initial investment will be outweighed by the increased profits.
4. Healthy Competition
The final reason that we’re going to discuss today is less to do with what CRM contains and more to do with the effect it has on your sales team. By allowing them access to real-time statistics around the performance of their team, they’ll also be able to see how they compare on an individual level.
By their very nature, salespeople rank among the most competitive members of an organisation. It’s one of the main reasons that sales process automation is so difficult to get right. No one can do sales like salespeople.
Now, allowing this to boil over into a toxic environment is definitely something to avoid. And operating as a team with very little competitive spirit is equally disastrous in the world of sales.
Finding a balance between these two is crucial, and this is something CRM, with the aid of management, can help with. By providing colleagues with both small and big picture statistics at their fingertips, it helps them to stay on track – pushing themselves to achieve more, but celebrating their successes.
What now?
Throughout this article, we’ve taken a look at both what a CRM is and why it is a crucial sales tool for businesses. Whether you operate with a B2C or B2B model, sales remains vital. Within B2C or B2B, CRM enables scalable growth and improves performance, and, the more you use it, the more helpful its data becomes.
So, if you haven’t invested in one yet, get started – and you’ll soon see the benefits.
