Complete guide to CRM: Meaning and Benefits

 CRM is critical for a successful business. It emphasizes customers and relationships with them. Customers are the heartbeat of a business. Customers are the priority of any business. Thus customer relationship management is integral for the running of any business. So let us start with what CRM is and its benefits, and how you can choose CRM for your business.

Definition

CRM is an acronym that stands for Customer Relationship Management. CRM is business software designed to manage the company’s interactions with the existing customers, new customers, and prospective customers.

CRM is mostly used by marketing and sales professionals. CRM helps businesses streamline an organization’s workflow to improve business’ productivity and efficiency. Thus it helps to drive business growth and increase customer satisfaction.

What is a CRM system?

CRM system is used for contact management and sales management. The CRM system is the central hub for all data regarding business contacts. These include prospective customers, suppliers, colleagues, press, and partners.

The CRM system saves customers interactions, which becomes the history of interactions between customer and business. These include calls, mail, sales, emails, and meeting notes. The CRM system has everything at once. This offers sales reps, marketers, and customer support to have clear visibility of customers in the sales pipeline and is effective in giving personalization and efficient working,

CRM Implementation and CRM Integration

CRM software is easy to integrate with other business apps like websites, digital marketing tools, and accounting software. Integration of CRM system allows automated workflows, and it replaces manual processes in business.

You can use CRM software to record new inquiries from the website and initiate an automated sales process. It helps capture inquiries as it will trigger new records in CRM and create a task for the sales team to follow up and send contact welcome messages.

What does CRM software do?

Here is a simplified list:

Customer-Centric Focus:

• Help find customers, contacts, and communication

• Improve post-sale service

• Offers customer support efficiency

• Increases customer loyalty

• Increases customer retention

Increase in Sales and Revenue

• Lead Generation

• Customer segmentation

• Prioritizing leads

• Tracks lead in the sales pipeline

• Automate sales process

• Manages communication 

• Manages appointment

• Manages tasks for teams

Centralized Hub

• It is a centralized hub for everything accessible in one place

• Creates total visibility

• All data and information is organized in one place

• End to duplication

• Enhance teamwork

• Enhance cross-team collaboration

• Facilitate Remote workforces

• Streamlines the process as it integrates with other systems

Insights, Reporting, and Analyze

• Analyze data for personalization and customization

• Accurate, detailed reports

• Offers to forecast of the sales generation

• Management of Marketing ROI

It provides ease, streamlines, efficiency, and effective organization of customers’ data and information. Everyone in the organization is accessible of information about the customers’ interactions through the dashboard of the CRM system as it includes all communications regarding what is purchased, when, how they paid, and so much more. Moreover, it allows having user permission levels to allow or restrict the permission and accessibility as to who can see the data.

Benefits of CRM

Organized information is always a blessing, and CRM is a mode of that blessing. Often the marketing team and sales team collect information about the prospective clients. Still, most of the time, they end up the information being held across multiple sources such as call logs, diaries, personal spreadsheets, etc.

CRM system offers an integrated solution that brings all data to a centralized hub. The software can facilitate teams to collaborate to create work efficiency. There is no duplication of work and data, no efforts lost, and no lost messages or forgotten follow-ups.

CRM offers timely communication, which helps to enhance relationships and thus increase sales and generate more revenue.

CRM Workflow Automation

Workflow Automation has become critical for the smooth and successful running of the business. Workflow automation takes care of manual sales processes so that there is less data input and admin. The automation process can prioritize the leads, share data insights from across different departments and business activities.

The CRM system helps to manage teams for effective and efficient working.

The CRM also controls data security and supports compliance norms and data privacy regulations.

CRM Benefits for your Business

• Enhance customer relationship management

• Enhance contact management

• Improve customer satisfaction

• Improve customer retention

• Offers advanced level sales management

• Increase efficiency of teamwork

• Increase productivity

• Creates cross-team collaboration

• Facilitate accuracy of reporting and data insights

• Supports in-depth sales metrics

• Heightens data insights for marketing campaigns

• Data insights help in product development

• Boosts business growth

• Boosts sales growth

• Maximizes revenue generation

Importance of CRM

CRM is important for many businesses- small scale and large scale. For many businesses, it is indeed essential or critical to their success.

The benefits of CRM can be maximized when you build a CRM strategy with your business strategy, goals, and vision. This helps in creating structure and organizing the company. It fosters better productivity, efficiency, effectiveness, and profitability.

CRM is often considered as software for the sales team. But benefits of a CRM system are for the whole organization. And the effect of different departments fostering collaboration is immeasurable.

A CRM system is extremely critical for marketers and teams that manage customer service and post-sale communications.

Its importance increases as the CRM system can share data-driven insight about how a business is performing, use actual sales data for decisions and forecasting. The CRM solution offers a complete overview of your customers’ communication, purchases, and activity. It lets you create a customer-centric focus that will shape your customer’s experience and communication strategy.

Who needs CRM software?

Customer Relationship Software is imminent for many businesses and relevant to many industry sectors, includes not for profit sector and many membership organizations. The CRM software is most used in sales, service desk functions, marketing, post-sales communication, and it is relevant across teams in different departments and efficient management.

Sales Team

Salespeople use a CRM system for monitoring new leads in the sales pipeline. Salespeople use it for data storage of log calls, meeting notes, setting tasks for teams, and ensuring timely follow-ups with customers. It also creates and sends quotations and invoices. It helps the sales department with reports and forecasting. The sales managers use CRM to have real-time visibility of the team’s performance against your business targets.

Marketing Team

Marketers integrate website forms with the CRM system as it helps to automate lead generation, capture new leads, and pass it to the sales team for follow-up. Marketers can send automated emails. Send an automated email that welcomes new customers. CRM system allows marketers to monitor responses.

The marketing team can run marketing campaigns from CRM as all communication and customer activity are recorded in the system. It provides insight into customer behavior and so that campaigns can be customized. It also helps in ROI analysis.

Service Team

With CRM comes an integrated help desk which enables the service team to monitor customers’ post-sales interactions. The dashboard helps with support tickets. When support tickets are raised, it comes to a notification to a customer account, and the sales team is alerted to potential issues.

A business that operates B2B generally targets an audience for the CRM vendors, but software can make a difference in many other markets.

How to select CRM?

When you are selecting CRM for your business, you need to be realistic about your company’s IT competence and needs of CRM. You need to know your budget. You will have to trade-off between ease of use and what features to include.

For a CRM system, price is determined based on how many users will be using the system, the number of customer records, the storage requirements, and several features included.

The point to note is even if you have a big budget and afford the best CRM system, you need to know if you need all the features. You don’t need to make any commitment all at once.

Many vendors offer a Free CRM trial, so you can get an idea as to how the system will work for your company and discover its benefits. You will know how their customer support helps up. Gradually you will shift to the paid version, which offers better benefits and cater to more users.

Auro CRM offers an integrated CRM solution that enables your company to discover maximum utility and selling power. It will help collaborate directly and consistently between marketers, sales reps, and customers. It enables to capture more information about each customer. It offers personalization and customization for customer interactions.

Auro CRM increases customer retention with smooth selling, cross-selling sell and upsell. Auro CRM eases ongoing operations and accessibility for all teams in different departments.

When should a business start using CRM?

The right time to invest in a CRM system varies as per the business, industry, and needs.

A general thumb rule is that if you have more prospects than you remember, you need a CRM system.

In some businesses, you may manage thousands of customers that have short sales cycles, or you have multiple repeat sales. You may have a few hundred contacts in some industries, but it has a lengthy sales cycle. It will need careful tracking. In any case, a CRM system will help you keep track of interactions and monitor the customer’s behavior. The CRM will help you effectively manage the frequency of the customer’s interactions to maximize sales.

Start with free and upgrade as your business scales to grow. If you have a limited budget and limited support, simple CRM will fit your need. As the business grows, you can upgrade. The start-ups can use free systems that include features needed to get you started.

Auro CRM offers you a customizable integrated solution with features that are needed for your business. We help you to scale your business high and grow with your growth. Using AuroCRM, all your end-to-end customer relationship activities will be managed with a single dashboard. Auro CRM will help you automate the process from lead generation; lead capturing to delivering a product to the customer. All from your desk provide customer support and handle all communication channels.