CRM, which was initially meant to serve customer relationship management goals, has outgrown the notion the abbreviation stands for. Now business leaders not only rely on CRM to easily manage clients but consider it one of their main growth hacking tools.
Let’s figure out what is so charming about a CRM system, what makes it a real bargain for your company, and why it’s high time you adopted CRM for your business growth.
Why CRM is important for your company
CRM, or a customer relationship management system, helps you gather, organize, and manage all information related to your customers. With its help, you can track the buyer’s journey for every prospect you interact with, build personalized communication, improve customer experience, and manage data. All in one place!
CRM statistics
Nothing speaks better than numbers!
So, before we dive into the advantages of leveraging a CRM for your business, what about first taking a look at statistics we’ve collected from various studies?
- CRM can boost your conversion rates by 300% (Source).
- The ROI of a CRM software system, when properly implemented, can exceed 245% (Source).
- The average ROI for CRM is $8.71 for every dollar spent (Source).
- CRM software can increase revenue by up to 29% (Source).
- CRM applications can increase revenue by up to 41% per sales rep (Source).
- Companies that use CRM have increased their sales forecast by 42% (Source).
- Sales teams that adopted CRM have grown productivity by 34% (Source).
- 50% of business owners say CRM increased productivity (Source).
- 65% of business owners claim CRM increased their sales quota (Source).
- 40% of business owners say CRM helped reduce their labor costs (Source).
- 74% of business owners state CRM improved customer relationships (Source).
- 74% of CRM software users claim their CRM system gave them improved access to customer data (Source).
- 50% of teams improved their productivity by using a mobile CRM (Source).
- Users of mobile CRM software experienced an 87% improvement in sales, a 74% increase in customer satisfaction, and a 73% improvement in business efficiency (Source).
How CRM can boost your business growth
Now let’s talk about eight main reasons your company needs a CRM solution to streamline its business processes.
1. CRM helps you effectively manage your customer relationships
The primary goal of any CRM is to help you center your activity around your customers and use the best approach to win their hearts. Only then will they become ready to part with their money for the sake of buying your product or service.
CRM allows you to quickly gain data about your clients and understand their current needs, preferences, goals, and pain points. Based on this knowledge, you can craft a highly personalized outreach campaign capable of getting them interested in your offering.
What is more, you’ll be able to provide your customers with relevant content (promotional, educational, etc.), establishing your company as an expert in the field. As a result, they will keep you in mind as the perfect business to trust and deal with.
At last, CRM helps you maintain this strong relationship of trust even when your customer base grows and tracking a single piece of customer data becomes much more complicated.
2. CRM helps you improve customer retention
Having a full customer history allows you to have a clear vision of how to maintain strong relationships with your customers after they’ve purchased your product or service.
Say, you can re-engage the accounts that are about to stop using your solution with a compelling deal. Or present satisfied customers with new opportunities, special offers, and discounts at the right time. This will decrease your churn rate and, even more, encourage repeat customer purchases.
3. CRM aligns your sales, marketing, and customer service teams
About 76% of customers want consistent interactions across departments. But in reality, it’s hard to do that without customer management tools!
CRM allows you to store all client data in one place and ensure that cross-functional departments have immediate access to a complete history of all touchpoints with the customer, from their entering the pipeline to their buying your solution.
No matter who is speaking to the customer (whether it’s a sales rep, a marketing specialist, or a service rep), all contact details are synced and updated in the CRM, so you can further share them with other team members.
This allows sales, marketing, and service teams to have a single vision of your customers and come up with a unified approach to solving their problems. Such consistency is a hallmark of quality service every customer expects to get from the company they buy from.
4. CRM automates your daily tasks
Besides being the best tool for managing customer relationships, CRM can provide you with an effective toolkit for sales, marketing, and service automation.
For instance, CRM can automate such tasks as:
- Data entering and contact record updates
- Sales workflows
- Finding lead contact information
- Assignment of leads to a sales rep
- Cold email automation
- Chatbot communication
- Lead nurturing campaigns, and many many more activities.
This will free your team from process-heavy tasks so that they can dedicate more time to direct communication with potential customers and building stronger relationships through personalization.
5. CRM is your best time-management tool
Apart from tons of manual work you can put on the shoulders of your CRM, you can rely on it to solve your problem of multi-tasking. CRM tools can help you with dozens of time-management challenges. For example:
- With an in-built or integrated team calendar, you can ensure everyone’s schedule is in sync. Say, whenever anyone sets, reschedules or cancels meetings, these changes are automatically reflected in the calendar of another team member.
- With a task report, you’ll always get informed about your daily agenda, prioritize activities, and keep track of your team members’ tasks.
- A daily report allows you to monitor recent activity within your business and identify the most active contacts. This helps you decide which contacts you should reach out to first.
6. CRM simplifies interactions with customers
These days you have lots of opportunities to reach out to potential and existing customers, such as email, phone and video calls, live chat, and social media. Owing to in-build communication tools and numerous integrations, modern CRMs can help you engage with your customers right from the platform.
For example:
- With email marketing tools, you can send single and bulk emails to your prospects and customers at the right time, as well as program follow-up messages.
- Email tracking software helps you easily track how your leads react to your emails, whether they’ve opened or ignored them.
- With LinkedIn automation tools, you can generate leads from this platform, streamline your cold outreach, and boost your business growth.
- In-built chatbots and live chats allow handling customers’ queries within seconds.
7. CRM collects all the data about your performance
CRM simplifies not only your interactions with customers but also the analysis and reporting of your processes. Its dashboards visualize your performance so you can easily focus on those metrics that are the most important at the moment.
Besides, you can share these reports with your team members and collaborate on finding the areas of opportunities and growth, all with a single aim — to deliver better service and improve customer experience.
8. CRM saves your money
It’s a fact that acquiring a new customer can cost you five times more than retaining an existing one. With CRM helping you retain your customers, you boost your chances of getting more and more won deals from repeat purchases, without spending lots of money on customer acquisition.
What is more, the functionality of your CRM can substitute dozens of unnecessary software, so you won’t need to spend money on keeping up their licenses. Instead, you’ll pay once for a single platform that will serve as a horn of plenty for your team, let alone the fact that some CRMs will cost you nothing.
Signs you need a CRM for your business
Okay. With all these benefits, CRM indeed seems like a wonderful solution for any business. But what if your company is not ready to invest in CRM software yet? How do you know it’s high time to start using it?
We’ve prepared a list of signals for you.
You have too many prospects to remember
The first sign of your need for a good CRM is when you realize you are handling more prospects than you can remember. It usually results in the same sad scenario: you forget to follow up, and your prospects leave you for your competitors.
Adopting a CRM, you’ll be able to take control of all interactions with your prospects as soon as they enter your sales funnel. Besides, CRM will send you reminders so you won’t miss an opportunity to follow up.
Your prospects communicate with multiple people within your company
In case your prospects have several points of contact within your organization, i.e., talk to marketers, sales reps, and support specialists, it’s easy to lose track of who said what. Or else, the message can be simply lost, never reaching the person in charge.
This leads to confusing situations and tells customers your company is not the one with the proper customer-care philosophy.
A CRM system will keep the history of all your interactions with the customer, allowing you to leave notes and recordings so that other team members can access them and stay updated on any changes made.
You have a long sales cycle
For B2B sales, lengthy sales cycles are a usual thing. Sometimes they can last up to several months. Remembering where each prospect is in the sales pipeline in such a case is not an easy task.
A CRM holds your sales pipelines under surveillance, so you can always get to the stage where you left off, without fear anything might get out of hand.
You are managing a sales team
If you are a sales team manager, you probably want to make sure all nuances of your sales reps’ interactions with prospects are under your control so that you could constantly provide proper sales coaching and upgrade their skills.
A CRM helps you monitor what your salespeople are doing, how they are performing, and what customers they are bringing to your company.
You are running marketing campaigns
If, apart from sales campaigns, you are sending your prospects and existing customers marketing messages (e.g., lead nurturing emails, re-engagement emails, etc.), you’d want to run all activities from one place, right?
Nothing will help you embrace all your tasks better than a reliable CRM. Say, with an integrated email marketing service, CRM can assist you in sending valuable marketing messages to those prospects who, for some reason, don’t respond to your cold calls, drawing them into the game.
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Still not persuaded enough?
No need to think twice when you can try once!
Snov.io offers an absolutely free CRM for all your sales whims. You can build and manage multiple pipelines, create and move deals depending on what stage you are at, know where you stand with your leads, and never miss a chance to follow up.
What is more, with Snov.io LinkedIn Automation tool, you can organize your sales process from scratch within one space. Snov.io toolset will help you find, verify, manage, connect, and convert your leads without switching tabs.
Finally, you can make sure your sales team works in full cohesion. Snov.io CRM allows sharing notes, templates, and setting responsible members for the deal — all in one system.
So, if you are looking for an answer to whether your business needs a CRM, get on board with Snov.io’s free solution and enjoy all the benefits of operating the system that automates your processes and brings your customer relationships to the next level.
