CRM

Building and maintaining customer relationships is what business is all about. So it should be no surprise that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a strategy(yes, it’s a strategy … not just a software!) that can revolutionize how you interact with your customers.

CRM  (Customer Relationship Management) has been around since the 1980s, but has really come into its own in the past 10 years as technology has rapidly evolved.  But let’s be clear: CRM is not “just” software. Even though the term CRM is the type of software used to deploy customer relationship strategies at scale, companies that don’t understand the strategy and application of CRM tend to end up with an expensive digital rolodex.

When you choose CRM as your business strategy, you are setting the "effective management of customer relationships" as a primary strategic objective.

While you can have good customer relationships without software, to pursue a strategy of CRM you need a CRM system. 

Let’s take a look at ways a CRM strategy can empower your business, from enhancing customer satisfaction to driving revenue growth.  

Understand your Business Goals

As with any technology, you must implement your CRM system with your business goals and objectives in mind. 

The main benefit of a CRM strategy is that it will help you understand your customers’ needs, preferences, and behaviors better, so you can be more responsive, deliver personalized experiences, and build lasting connections.

Start by asking yourself some of these questions:

• Are we struggling to track leads and opportunities effectively?
• Do we struggle to get customers to understand why they need us?
• Do our salespeople experience very long sales cycles that eventually fizzle out?
• Are we receiving customer complaints or experiencing slow response times? 
• Do we need to improve communication and collaboration between sales, marketing, and customer service teams?

Asking and answering these questions can help you understand what you need to improve, and what you should expect your CRM to do.

Key Features of a CRM System

There are a lot of different CRM systems out there, but they aren’t all the same. We tend to think about them as CRM 1.0 through CRM 4.0.  

• CRM 1.0 systems are those very basic digital rolodexes that track your customer purchases, and let you record notes and important dates (birthday card, anyone??). 
• CRM 2.0 and 3.0 are a little more advanced, offering email marketing, or some sales pipeline tools, or basic sales automations.

But since CRM 1/2/3.0 costs about as much as CRM 4.0, we just skip to the 4.0 systems, or what we call “Smart CRM.” Systems like HubSpot and Keap will give you everything we’ve described above, and more. Complex business automation, content creation, sales playbooks, and more … all designed to make you more timely, relevant, and valuable to your customers. So when you’re looking for a CRM, don’t settle for a system that is doing the work of two or three generations ago.

Now to the specifics: What kinds of features should you expect your CRM system to do to support your CRM strategy?

• Contact Management: Centralize all your customer information, making it easily accessible and organized. This includes contact details like names, addresses, phone numbers, and emails, as well as purchase history, preferences, and notes. But CRM 4.0 systems go beyond that, allowing you to do sophisticated opportunity analysis and behavioral segmentation as well as to identify where each contact falls in the sales pipeline. With powerful lead scoring tools your CRM can alert you immediately when it’s time to pay more attention to any individual contact!
• Sales Automation: Your CRM system should streamline your sales processes and help you manage leads, track opportunities, and close deals more effectively. By automating tasks such as lead generation, qualification, and follow-up, sales teams can focus on building relationships and closing deals. Additionally, CRM analytics provide valuable insights into sales performance, enabling you to identify areas for improvement and optimize your sales strategies.
• Marketing Automation: Marketing teams can use CRM to create more targeted and effective marketing campaigns to support sales. By tracking customer behavior and preferences, you can segment your audience, deliver personalized messages, measure campaign performance, nurture leads and optimize marketing efforts. 
• Customer Service: A CRM system empowers your customer service team to build stronger and more personalized relationships with customers. By having a centralized comprehensive view of customer interactions, history, and preferences, your team will be able to quickly address customer inquiries and resolve issues.
• Analytics and Reporting: CRM systems provide valuable insights into customer behavior, sales performance, and marketing effectiveness. You can do a better job identifying trends, adjust your strategies to exploit current and future conditions, and make data-driven decisions. 
• Integration Capabilities: 4.0-status CRM systems integrate with other business applications, like your work email, accounting, POS, ERP, and other vital business software to eliminate double data entry and create seamless workflows. 

CRM Strategy + CRM Software = Profitable Growth

If business 20 years ago was like driving on the Interstate, business today is like flying jet airplanes. When everything is moving so fast, you don’t have time to pick through multiple systems to understand your customers, and you certainly can’t rely on assumptions and intuition to anticipate future needs. A modern CRM system, implemented with a deep understanding of CRM strategy, will help you understand customers needs, deliver personalized experiences, and improve customer relationships. It will help you be more competitive.

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Need a knowledgeable partner to support you on this journey? Let us help! We have deep CRM expertise, and we are dedicated to helping you make the right technology choices to achieve your growth goals.

Call us at 312.239.8820 X 704, orbook a free consult.

Do you have just one generic topic of conversation for everybody you know? Probably not, right? You know what your close friends and family are interested in, and you can ask them specific questions about it and show genuine interest. When you pass that neighbor you hardly know on the street, you might give him the old “cold enough for ya?” and move on. But when you really want to build a relationship with someone and show them you care, conversations get more personal and varied. When you connect with people, you find common ground. You talk about things that are important to them. You personalize.

Customers have so much choice these days that just offering great products might not be enough. You need to build a relationship with them. While these relationships won’t be as intimate as a relationship with a family member, you can still show them you care. This typically takes the form of emails or text messages that are relevant to them and what they need from you.

If you have only a handful of customers—say, no more than 20—you can probably take the time to talk to each one personally and get to know them. But when you’re dealing with hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of customers, personalization requires a little help from technology.

Smart CRM

Your CRM is the place to store all of your information about your customers and contacts, but if that’s all you’re using it for, you’re missing out on some of its most powerful marketing features. While personalized marketing was a differentiator just a few years ago, it’s a basic customer expectation these days. Your CRM is the place to bring together data on all customer interactions. Based on that data, you can create segmented email lists and create workflows that trigger personalized emails when certain conditions are met.

List Segmentation

There are a number of ways you can segment your email lists to personalize communication. Demographic segmentation separates customers based on factors like age and gender. Geographic segmentation is useful if you offer different products or promotions to people in different parts of the world. Lifecycle segmentation, particularly useful in B2B, lets you create lists based on where leads and customers are in their journey with you, whether they are new subscribers, marketing or sales qualified leads, or current customers.

With customers in different lists, you can enter them into different kinds of email sequences so that each group only gets information that is relevant to them. Customers are more likely to open relevant emails and more likely to click on links. In the process, you’re building trust, which is the foundation of any relationship.

Creating Workflows

Workflows go a step further than segmentation, personalizing messages based on behavior rather than demographics—that is, based on what they dorather than what they are.For example, you can create workflows that enter customers into a “welcome” sequence when they first give you their email address. If they leave without buying anything, but come back a month later, a workflow can trigger a “welcome back” email. You can also create workflows for website visitors who look at certain pages or leads who browse your online catalogue or request a quote. The marketing team crafts the content that speaks to each group, and the automations make sure the right people see those messages.

Give Customers What They’re Expecting

Personalization is how you stand out from the crowd and make the kind of connections that encourage not only customer loyalty but brand advocacy and personal identification with a brand. While personalization was once a differentiator, customers have come to expect some level of personalization in their interactions with a business. It’s an opportunity for you to demonstrate what your business is about and get the attention of the right kind of customer, but doing it at scale requires a little help from technology. A smart CRM makes it easy to create lists and workflows so that the right content gets to the right customers at the right moment.