5 Reasons Why Your Company Needs a CRM

Picture the scene: Mary is a newly-promoted leader on a six-person sales team in an automotive company. She’s ambitious and wants to boost the overall efficiency of her department. However, starting out in any new role is always challenging, especially when your duties involve managing people and establishing your authority.

What’s the major challenge Mary has to face? She needs to work out:

• a transparent, natural and unconstrained way to streamline the workflow of her team.
• a means of monitoring her team’s performance.
• how to ensure that the performance of her team, once measured, continues to grow.

Mary also needs to quickly spot and manage any bottlenecks in the sales pipeline. This is where an efficient and user-friendly CRM system can help.

Indeed, recent research has shown that strategic use of CRM systems can lead to an increase in sales of up to 30%, making it an essential piece of software for any company that strives for growth.

And what about you? Do you use any CRM software at your organization? If not, then this is a guide for you! Below we will examine how you and your company can benefit from CRM implementation.

Okay, let’s start from the beginning.

What is a CRM system?

CRM is a technology that allows you manage all customer-related interactions, whilst facilitating the improvement of your business relationships. A good CRM software gathers data about your commercial prospects, before analyzing the data to assess the status of a specific sales opportunity. This makes it one of most fundamental, and valuable, systems that your business can implement.

Based on the information obtained with your CRM system, you can make data-driven decisions that are informed and intelligent. As a result, you can stay in touch with your customers, streamline your sales processes and increase profitability.

Start using a CRM system and start selling smarter.

Once you implement CRM at your organization, you’ll have an all-in-one dashboard to:

• collect and store customer data
• group customer data
• archive customer data
• record a full history of interactions with prospects and view the sales pipeline
• log activities such as emails, phone calls, voicemails, and in-person meetings
• schedule calls and meetings with customers internally
• track deal stages
• manage all other customer-related interactions

In this way, you’ll reinforce your control over your user base and save the time. Now, let’s break down this list and take a closer look at the different benefits of CRM individually.

1. Everything in one place

Not using a CRM system yet? Then you’re most likely still using Google Sheets or Excel to handle your ongoing deals. As a result, your data is most likely a mess. In sales, speed and ease are deal-makers or breakers.

Therefore, you need to be continually looking for ways to make time-saving efficiencies in order to close more deals. After all, searching through your inbox for the last message to recall a prospect’s status is a waste of time and energy, that the modern commercial salesperson simply can’t afford.

Let’s be honest with ourselves, we’re never going to remember all of our prospect’s or their requirements, or at what stage they are at in the pipeline. And once you forget what a specific touchpoint is with a prospect, you’re dead and gone. “But I always take notes”, I hear you cry. Unfortunately, it’s not a bulletproof solution. You forget your pen, you writing may be eligible if written in a hurry and physical notes have a tendency to disappear into thin air if not properly archived.

Fortunately, a smart CRM software and ultimately declutter your life!

Introduce harmony to your work environment by employing the right essential tools, including CRM. Anytime you need to see what the points of leverage are for a given prospect, that information is already there, accessible in just one click.

Additionally, a CRM empowers you to plan better. You can easily customize your sales process, or even create several sales processes, applicable to specific clients or industries. Organize your tasks into a perfect flow to minimize extra work and automate all your tasks into a smart queue.

In Livespace you can create as many sales processes as you need.

2. CRM improves team communication

Apart from making the lives of sales reps easier, CRMs improve team communication at the organizational level.

Since CRM software is transparent, it gives an unconstrained overview of information to other team members and managers, so everyone can see the status of a given prospect, without the need to reach out directly to the rep in charge of the deal. This is especially useful when someone is off and another person has to temporarily assume responsibility.

CRMs standardize the sales workflow and combine it into one consistent board. In this way, all sales representatives use the same sales pipeline and track their tasks in the same way. In addition, the unified system makes it easy for a manager to understand, analyze and evaluate overall team performance.

See how you can analyze each stage of your sales process in Livespace.

3. Advanced reporting

Another fantastic feature that makes this tool even more powerful is an option to generate real-time reports. Reports help you better analyze your performance and check whether the numbers match your expectations.

After all, revenue is not the only measure that matters. There are several indicators that should be continually measured and optimized. Reports from your CRM will shed some light on the following questions:

• What are the best ways of reaching out to customers from the targeted industry?
• What are the most successful sales patterns from the previous month that can be implemented by other team members?
• What is the average time taken to close the deal?
• Where are the bottlenecks in your sales funnel and how can they be addressed?
• What products are popular and performing well among customers?
• What products are underperforming and why?
• What are the chances that your sales plan will be executed by the end of the given interval?

If you know the answers to all the questions above, then you’re capable of estimating future sales revenue for your organization.

4. A CRM makes your sales team scalable

A CRM system let’s managers identify the winning patterns that promote the sustainable growth of the organization.

Those successful strategies and good practices can then be multiplied → duplicated and implemented by other team members. In this way, the sales manager can improve the performance of the whole team and give it a shove in the right direction.

5. CRMs encourage customer happiness and retention

Your customers watch your representatives’ behavior and they expect it to be flawless. Even more than that, they are often convinced to buy because of a professional and proactive approach by your team.

While customer satisfaction is, of course, based on your product’s quality, customer service is also a huge added value that builds customer loyalty and makes your existing customers stay with you longer and purchase upsells.

After all, the primary reason why customers abandon your company is that they believe you don’t care about them.

source

While CRM is about knowing your customers and helps arrange the information in a clear order, it also let’s you quickly recall the details about every sales opportunity and reminds you of all of the necessary touchpoints.

Conclusion

CRM is a software that lets you work in a transparent, natural and unconstrained way, creating a unified pipeline and helps streamline the workflow of your sales team. It empowers managers to keep a watchful eye on the overall team’s performance and to help make sure it’s growing.

CRM makes the job a lot easier for you, so why make things complicated?

Hope that I’ve convinced you that a CRM is fundamental for your business success. Employ this system right away and start maximizing your sales opportunities! Do you have any further questions? Feel free to put them in the comments below.