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.

There are so many tasks that no one is ever thrilled to tackle, the ones you have to do over and over for every new customer, new sales sequence, new promotion, new spreadsheet loaded into your CRM…the list goes on. Those repetitive tasks are never-ending, and there’s never enough time to deal with them. Even worse, they all exist in their own apps, forcing employees to log in here, log in there, and switch their attention between different systems.

That’s where workflow automations come in. Rather than leave different employees to handle these tasks manually in a dozen different software ecosystems, automate them in your CRM. Workflow automations are low- or no-code (drag-and-drop) features you design to handle specific repeatable tasks. When triggered by a specific user-defined action, the workflow takes over to complete the task. Workflow automations ensure that a task is completed in the same way every time, helping with compliance, scalability, adaptability, and the minimization of errors.

Marketing Automations

It’s easy to give a handful of customers a personalized experience in the form of a special promotion or experience designed just for them. But when you’re serving dozens, hundreds, or thousands of customers, you simply don’t have the time or personnel to reach out to each one individually.

Marketing automations solve that problem of scaling up the customer experience. One of the more useful workflows involves entering different customers into different email sequences based on different actions. For example, you can set up a workflow to send a welcome email to visitors to your website the first time they enter their email address on the site, a promotional email to visitors who return but haven’t purchased anything, and information about requesting a quote to visitors who frequently visit your catalog or product pages.

Doing all of this manually would take up hours of your day, or would require a whole team of people just monitoring and analyzing traffic and behavioral data. Setting up a workflow might take about an hour, and that workflow can be used over and over for different campaigns and promotions.

Sales Automations

Just as marketing automations can get the right message to the right customer at scale, sales automations can help salespeople keep up with customer inquiries, track leads as they move through the sales pipeline, and receive notifications as soon as leads open an email. Workflows can assign leads to particular salespeople or add them to a particular email sequence according to user-defined criteria. And when a sale is made, that event can trigger a workflow that sends confirmation to the sales department and an invoice to the customer while adding the customer to a post-sales nurture sequence.

Data Automations

To glean good insights from your data and use it to make strategic decisions, you need clean data. Data cleanup involves removing outdated records, fixing typos and other errors, standardizing abbreviations, and making sure everything is in the right place. This can be time-consuming, as it's easy to miss small details in large databases. Automation can help fix these errors and irrelevancies that crop up in databases over time.

Make Time for the Important Work

I know…sometimes, when technology promises to “take the drudgery out of work” or “free up employees to do more creative tasks that require strategic thinking,” it ends up making more of a different kind of work. That’s not what workflows do. What you automate are the things that, if you have too much on your plate, you’d push to tomorrow, or the things that have to be done quickly, automatically, and the same way every time. You automate the delivery, not the deliverable.

The tasks to automate do not comprise a job on their own; they comprise the work that takes up the time of people who are best served doing other things: creating marketing materials, following up with leads that need personal attention, handling customer inquiries, and making strategic decisions. Workflow automations bring the repetitive, repeatable tasks into your CRM so that your employees can focus on what they do best: using their skills and experience to create real value for your business.

After peaking in 2023, employee engagement has declined for two years in a row, and looks set to fall again in 2026. The reasons for this malaise are…well, just look around. We’re not exactly living in the most joyous and carefree of times. The rising cost of everything, a stagnant job market, and a worrying future have a lot of American workers feeling trapped and hopeless. These aren’t the conditions that enable people to do their best.

Normally, when people start to disengage emotionally from their job, they go looking for a new one: a new challenge, a fresh start. But that’s not an option for many workers. The way to get employees engaged again is to bring that same feeling to their current job. The answer to fixing these engagement issues may lie in your CRM.

Why Employees Disengage

There are a number of factors that influence employee engagement. Some of them, like family or social life, are largely beyond an employer’s ability to influence, though creating a welcoming, safe environment can help employees feel a little more relaxed and secure at work.

Other factors that influence engagement arise, intentionally or unintentionally, from workplaces processes (or the absence of clear processes). Lack of support from superiors is a leading factor. The cliché “people don’t quit jobs, they quit managers” is a cliché because it’s true. Similarly, employees disengage when their contributions to company success go unrecognized or their suggestions for improving the workplace fall on deaf ears. Other employees lose interest in their jobs when they are not given the opportunity to grow. Personal growth at work might take the form of promotions, but not always. Expanded knowledge and expanded responsibility through professional development programs keep employees engaged. When we’re not learning and growing—when we’re stagnating—we become disenchanted and just go through the motions.

These factors (lack of support, lack of recognition, lack of growth opportunities) all lie within the remit of HR. The challenge is collecting data on employee engagement levels, diagnosing which of these reasons is behind disengagement, and successfully implementing the right solutions.

The Role of CRM

Though it’s called a customer relationship management system, CRM has evolved quite a bit since its introduction as a “digital rolodex.” If you’re just using it to store customer information, you’re missing out on some of its more powerful features. CRM is a way of doing business that brings sales and marketing into alignment in service of the customer. Modern smart CRM systems can do even more than that, giving your HR department insight into sales, marketing, and operations productivity, capacity, and engagement, helping you identify what’s working and what’s not in employee engagement. This holistic approach to human resources enables a customer-centric culture in which each department stays focused on serving the customer the best possible experience.

Here are some of the ways CRM can support an employee engagement initiative.

Time Tracking and Capacity: See who is overwhelmed and who is being underutilized. Employees with both too much and too little on their plate can become disengaged. A CRM shows you how employees are spending their time, where more help is needed, and where that help can come from.

Skills Management:Learning is an ongoing process. Onboarding helps new employees integrate into a new workplace. Training teaches them the day-to-day processes of their role. Professional development keeps those skills sharp and up-to-date. All three are typically managed through a learning management system (LMS).

When you integrate your LMS with your CRM, you put customer data and needs at the center of your onboarding, training, and professional development programs. Employees get the benefit of accessing everything through a single system. Administrators benefit by having the ability to design courses around customer needs based on marketing and sales data. This is how CRM can play an integral role in training and onboarding optimization.

In-App Messaging: Poor communication is a major contributor to disengagement. A smart CRM keeps all communication in one place, easily accessible to everyone who needs it. Customer interactions, conversations with leads, and discussions between team members all happen in one place, keeping lines of communication open and reducing the frustration of missing an important message.

Segmented and Automated Messaging:Missing an important message, whether from a lead or a coworker, is frustrating, but so is being bombarded with irrelevant messages. A CRM lets you segment employees by department, seniority, role, on-site or remote status, and more to ensure employees aren’t overwhelmed by irrelevant messages.

Data Analytics:Data is at its most powerful when it is comprehensive, pulling in insights from all departments, and from employees and customers alike.

Enabling People Through Technology

Technology has a role to play in making your workplace an engaging one, but the right tech alone is only one piece of the puzzle. The data you gather can help you identify which systems and processes are fostering engagement and which are not. The right platforms can also help you implement. Technology works best when it is implemented as part of a culture of continuous learning and development, in which all employees understand the goals of the business and are pulling in the same direction. Growing a business requires both a plan for success that everybody understands and the technological tools that empower employees to do their best in service of that goal.

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.