1. Better insights on leads and customers for better marketing and sales
Wouldn’t it be convenient to know exactly when a potential customer is visiting your website? A CRM system gives you that specific knowledge, such as how many times a potential customer has visited the website, what he or she has looked at and whether they have had a conversation with an employee.
When your sales reps work in a CRM system that is integrated with the website, they will have access to a wide range of detailed information. It sets the stage for another kind of dialogue when a salesperson contacts a potential customer and actually knows what the customer has shown interest in or which products and services they have previously purchased. Instead of starting completely from scratch, the salesperson can provide a good service by asking questions that help the customer and create value from the start.
When you integrate the software you use for marketing automation with your CRM, the marketing team can personalize content to the target audience based on data on the individual recipient. Also, the integration allows your marketing department to see which campaigns or ads created the most traffic, which characteristics these visitors have in common, and intensify the initiatives that create the largest share of customers. This way, they can always choose the initiatives that work best and thereby optimize campaigns to get the most out of the marketing budget.
When the marketing department works in a platform integrated with CRM, they can also track which leads have become customers. For example, when a lead becomes a buying customer, the sales rep changes his or her status in the CRM system and that automatically changes elsewhere too, in the marketing platform, for example.
This allows the marketing department to do two things. First of all, the customer is automatically removed from the lists of leads. This is good since leads must be treated differently to customers. Second, the marketing department can now target messages for customers, campaigns and information about relevant events aimed directly at buying customers to increase customer retention.
2. Tearing down walls between sales and marketing
If your company’s departments work in silos in different software, the data stream is rarely coordinated and customer information will not have a single source of truth. In other words, the sales team may have information about a potential customer in their systems, while the marketing department works towards a completely different target group.
As a result, sales and marketing can pull in different directions. Instead of working in different silos, sales and marketing must have one common goal, which is to close sales. Accordingly, marketing must take some of the responsibility for sales and find out which marketing KPIs support sales people to close more sales.
By keeping your customer data updated in one central location, it is also easier to share the same goals as well as identify challenges and take the right action to solve them directly. It will streamline the overall operation of the entire company when all employees have access to the same information about the customer.
A good marketing automation system can also work well to build a bridge between the two departments. Integrate your CRM with your marketing automation system, and you have a strong transparent engine throughout the customer journey. Having accurate, detailed records of each customer interaction that anyone on your team can reference and use to drive sales is a known and desirable side effect of using CRM.
3. Gives you a prioritized pipeline that puts the best leads first
A pipeline is the list of potential leads your salespeople are working on to get customers. Some are relatively distant, some are close, but these leads are realistic opportunities and can be prioritized. A CRM system not only provides a complete overview of your options, but helps sales reps to prioritize who to contact first, so they do not miss a potential new customer.
It also allows marketing to sort incoming leads and hand over the most qualified ones to the sales team. In other words, marketing must assess which leads are the hottest. Do they fit your ideal customer profile, and have they had genuine interest? Sales and marketing therefore need to agree which criteria constitute a good lead.
When setting up a CRM system, they should identify important criteria about how an ideal lead should behave and reward actions with lead scoring. A lead scoring model is a set of rules for how you qualify a lead. How they behave on your website, which articles they read, which reports are downloaded, etc. Each action generates points, and the leads that have the most points should be contacted first.
Through their different interactions, the sales team must also investigate if the leads have received the relevant knowledge they need through their customer journey. If your salespeople often experience that there are things that their leads lack answers to, then it is their job to pass that information on to marketing so that they can correct it in the future.
4. Better time efficiency through admin task automation
Companies are constantly becoming more and more specialized in their field and most today have in-house experts. In the same way, you can look at sales departments, which probably also have several knowledgeable, outgoing and energetic sales people onsite. People with these qualities are valuable to a company and should not spend a large part of their working time on tasks where they are not allowed to use their "talent" to the full.
With that said, we should not underestimate the fact that sales work also involves a lot of administrative tasks such as reporting, documentation and logging. In addition, a sales rep might be working out of multiple systems to keep in touch with leads – email, live chat, phone – and spend a great deal of time moving from one system to another and manually recording notes from each touchpoint.
A modern CRM system can automate many of the administrative tasks and processes that your salespeople currently do manually by offering integration between your CRM and other business processes. Ultimately, this not only simplifies the work of the sales department, but reduces friction, minimizes risks of errors and provides you with more productive and profitable sales.
A CRM system empowers you to analyze your salespeople’s activities to discover what outreach strategies or series of touchpoints work best, which helps your team to allocate its time most efficiently and close more deals overall.
5. Easy access to reports on common goals and individual achievements
A CRM system also enables you to pull the reports you need with greater accuracy and consistency at the click of a button. Real-time reports on a company’s current condition creates common ground for united efforts to achieve common goals. And if your business has several departments talking to customers – customer service, presale, aftersale, etc. – the possibilities are even bigger.
For management, reports on results are important. They show whether or not the current strategy is working properly or if it needs to be adjusted for the company to achieve its goals. Reporting is also important for employees, to both see where they can improve individually and show when things are going well.
The vast majority of CRM systems can also be scaled as needed. The size of the different departments and the whole business is rarely a limitation.
