A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is, “A technology for managing all of your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers with the goal to improve business relationships” (Salesforce Blog). A CRM not only helps the Sales team, but it also benefits more groups within your company such as marketing, development, and customer service teams. With everything stored in one place and updated in real-time, your company will run more accurately and efficiently. After eleven years of doing Salesforce Consulting, we wanted to list the top 10 reasons why your company will love a CRM system.
1. Customer Visualization
A CRM system keeps everything organized and updated. Whether you are looking for leads, contacts, marketing campaigns, or advanced analytics, a CRM system makes these features easily accessible. Being able to have all of your customer’s recently updated information in one place is essential when it comes to knowing your customers wants and needs. Keeping information accessible allows for a smooth transition after a sales deal from the sales team to the development team.
2. Opportunity Tracking
With opportunities in CRMs, you can track deal amounts or size, current stage, next stage, and more. Being able to track these key items allows teams to go into the opportunity to see where the deal is at and what are the next steps. Having this tracking in one system allows everyone in your company to be proactive. With a robust CRM like Salesforce, everything we send out has tracking so that we can check on the performance of our sales and marketing strategies.
3. Organization of Data
As mentioned above, one of the great features of a CRM system is that everything is in one place. This saying can get repetitive, but it is one of the best benefits because of how organized your system can be. Your company will not have to jump on different systems to use various features. CRM will provide your company with the tools to organize your leads, contacts, analytics, and more all in one place. An organized company generally results in more ROI.
4. Streamlining the Company
Necessary but tedious work is done within the system to help your company save time. A tedious task, such as finding out who’s the best resource to answer a case question, can be automated. Knowing which sales reps should own a new lead based off of criteria such as location can also be an example to save time. The bonus of some CRMs is that they have embedded AI such as Einstein Analytics with Salesforce. The importance of having a quality AI system is becoming a crucial aspect in recognizing those early signs of interaction with your company.
5. Automation Benefits
Having automation will save time for everyone in your company. A CRM such as Salesforce has automation that helps departments all across the company. An example of automation in Salesforce is workflows. Automating workflows help move deals down the pipeline, send important notifications, and automatically reach out to customers on behalf of sales reps. It is more than just workflows though, some other benefits of optimizing your automation processes include marketing, generating leads, aligning sales and marketing, and more.
6. Easy Customization
You can easily customize the data that you want to see so that you are getting the most accurate data. Developing dashboards that are fit to your exact need will help with recognition of your company’s objective. Customization does not stop at just data and dashboards. Being able to customize everything in your CRM to fit your specific business needs will help your companies effectiveness all around. The sales team can have a particular view of the system that shows objects they should interact with, while the marketing team can have a look specific to their needs.
7. Sales Forecasting
CRM systems provide real-time data and reports of your sales pipeline and KPIs. With this kind of information in your reports and dashboards, you can see immediately how your performance is doing. Having this real-time data in one place allows your sales representatives to make improvements to their sales strategy.
8. Additional Collaboration
There is improved communication between multiple teams with a CRM system. Every calendar update, email, and phone calls are stored in one location. Everyone in your company now has information regarding updates of your clients. With a CRM system like Salesforce, Chatter allows a social messaging board for all teams to communicate and collaborate on issues, deals, and more.
9. Better Customer Service
CRM systems fix client issues rapidly and efficiently through easy communication. Reps being able to pull up the customer information in one system will give them a better understanding of the issue at hand. Having excellent customer service could be the critical difference between customers returning for more business or not. At Corrao Group, we use Cases in our Salesforce CRM to help resolve customer issues quickly and efficiently.
10. Increased Engagement
A CRM system provides a nurturing process for leads that allows your company to see the level of engagement they are having with your material. Due to improved opportunities for engagement, the retention rate is better with a CRM as well. Improved engagement means that customer relationships encourage referrals for the maintained success of your company.
Having an excellent CRM system is essential to you and your companies success. At Corrao Group, we have been doing Salesforce consulting for the past 11 years. We have completed over 2,050 Salesforce projects which equates to 78,500 implementation hours. We are true Salesforce power users, capable of helping you to maximize your Salesforce investment. If you would like to learn more about our Salesforce consulting, please visit our website.
