1. Is CRM just a software package?
CRM is both technology and a methodology to engage with clients to deliver a great customer experience.
What is a CRM?
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. When correctly implemented, CRM systems improve the quality of your organisation’s engagement with your customers and potential customers. It’s also known as customer retention management software.
Modern CRM tools are cloud-based and run on all devices (from desktop to mobile), enabling your staff to track conversations, create and monitor sales pipelines and forecasts. Additionally many CRMs facilitate your customer service and marketing.
A quality CRM platform is designed around user and client security and also have advanced tools such as Artificial Intelligence, automation and sentiment analysis for providing automatic insights into the current state of your relationship with your customers.
Questions about CRM? Just ask us.
The decision to introduce CRM into your organisation involves far more than choosing the right technology. The best CRM implementations always follow a considered business strategy.
You need to consider multiple factors, many of which impact one another.
Confusing? It doesn’t have to be.
If you’re considering implementing a CRM platform, the following discussion points might be helpful. These are probably only a fraction of the questions you may have, so please call us, or get in touch via our webform if you’d like to have a one-on-one chat.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I use CRM for marketing?
The days of sending an email campaign to a list and hoping for a response are gone. By combining your EDM and other marketing tools with your CRM you gain the benefit of building a complete client picture, allowing you to send the right message to the right person at the right time.
Start by synchronising your CRM lists with your marketing tools. Some CRM applications such as Sugar CRM or Zoho have this function built in. Decide upon how best and when to communicate with your list. Some tools automatically calculate best time of day to send, while you decide upon the channel (such as email, SMS or social) by reviewing open rates and click throughs.
Automatically monitor the response to the campaigns and use the tools to redirect prospects to follow-up campaigns or further nurturing depending on their responses. By running responses through automatic sentiment analysis, you can feed these clients into even finer-grained follow-up campaigns. Finally, determine the revenue generated from your campaign activity by having the CRM report against opportunities-won for a complete picture.
This is just one method out of many. Get in touch to discuss your marketing plans.
How CRM improves business performance
Knowledge is power, so they say.
Your CRM is a trusted single source of truth for your entire business. Capture and store all relevant conversations between you and your clients, whether they are emails, phone records, text messages or social posts. In this way, you gain a complete history of promises made, client concerns, issues and wins.
Integrated sales forecasting and opportunity management mean you have complete clarity about the sales pipeline, and by using the automatic analysis tools and exception reporting you’re always on the front foot. By using the mobile or tablet apps to keep you up to date, you’ll never walk into a meeting unprepared again.
Acquire new clients smoothly through integrated marketing tools and save time servicing them by system-wide automation that frees staff to work on more productive tasks.
Have a performance goal in mind? Speak to us about the best way to achieve it.
What is a Customer Journey?
A customer journey map is your holistic guide to interacting with your clients to achieve a goal.
Do you want more lead conversions? Increase customer satisfaction? Boost sales? Gain a holistic client view?
Working from a customer journey map, you and your staff stay in control and accountable. Journey maps are tools that take guesswork out of important stages in the interaction with customers and not only increase customer satisfaction but improve conversion rates for new prospects.
Have a chat to us about how to set up your own customer journeys.
How do I Choose a CRM?
With so many CRM systems in the market, and all of them promising to offer the complete solution to your organisation’s needs, where do you start? Oddly enough, you don’t start with the tool. It’s easy to get caught in the hype around any technology, but just like you don’t start building a house without a blueprint, you shouldn’t start with the CRM and try to reverse-engineer your needs into its structure. Whilst most CRMs share the same basic goals, how they operate can be vastly different.
Instead, begin with identifying your business’s biggest pain point. Does the software deal with this naturally or will there be customisation? Will the tool scale with your needs? What is the cost per user? Are there hidden costs in maintaining the system?
Most importantly, do you plan to go it alone or work with a partner to help you through the process? As a partner to many organisations that have implemented CRM successfully, we know the pitfalls and also how to get fast wins. We’d love to discuss the process with you.
We use and recommend both Sugar CRM and Zoho One. Both CRMs are powerful and offer distinct and unique benefits, based on your needs. You can read more on both below.