Customer Relationship Management Tool (CRM) is becoming critical for SME’s. With thin lines of differentiation between competing products & services, the need to ‘know’ your customers and ‘be there’ when they want to buy it critical.
Some people think CRM is used only for storing or maintaining the data. Apart from storing or maintaining data, CRM does lot other vital things which are listed below.
Find your best customers
Remember the 80/20 rule – 80% of your business / revenues usually come from 20% of your customers or 20% of your customers represent 80% of your sales. Through CRM you can know who these 20% most valuable customers are.
Build & protect your Historical Data
The most important data usually stay with employees. CRM data, if maintained in MS-Excel is prone to loss or misuse. More importantly, it may be fragmented across multiple sheets maintained by each employee separately. An employee leaving an organization results in loss of valuable data. Managing security or having control on data is very unsustainable. CRM provides solid security and control over data by providing Authorized Personnel Access, Data monitoring, Disaster Risk Management and User Management, Record and Field level security and restricted access to service.
Up-sell/Cross-Sell
There is always complementary or related products to your first product as you go along your business journey. Reaching each of the clients by calling or mailing manually is the never-ending process. CRM helps in automating the manual email process by “Mass Mailing” and optimizes the calling process by Telephony Integration. You can also get status of email and call recordings.
For example, a company that sells shampoo knows that after three months, the customer will have to buy it again. The company can promote a new offer that includes combo of shampoo and matching conditioner. The process of up sell/cross sell or follow-up can be automated very easily and a negligible cost.
Purchase Frequency
It’s very important to know about the likes and dislikes of your customers. CRM gives the trend of purchase made by customer in the past, which helps in planning your Marketing Strategy.
Track of Sales Process
It’s very important to ensure that their Sales People are following every step. Missing / Jumping of a step can cause loss of a deal. CRM is the great monitoring tool. It gives complete insights of Sales Process
Optimized Software
Customers sometimes have multiple applications to handle customers eg. a Lead Management Software, a mass mailing software, an Excel customer database, etc. This leads to islands of information about customers. All this is usually available in a single CRM application – resulting in high quality data availability
Notifications & Reminders
It’s important to keep a track of that important sales contact or prospect, but you need reminders about when to touch base. Failure to follow-up could mean losing an important relationship. CRM provides notifications and gives reminders about important contacts and prospects you maybe haven’t spoken to lately. Be there when the customer is ready to buy
Work on the go with Mobile
Apps Every Sales Rep/ Account Manager have to do multiple things while on move which makes it impossible for person to follow-up all the activities. Many CRM solutions provide mobile app which give complete visibility and updates to field Sales Reps, Account Manager or Management.
Reports & Dashboards
Sales Reports are very important part of an SME organization. Sales people need to be away from their core activity to create reports for Management. CRM provides a solution for quick or real-time reports. You can even schedule reports as per your frequency like Hourly, Daily and Weekly etc
CRM is the Heart of Business
Usage of CRM software helps increase sales opportunities, purchase frequency and average order value to give you a healthy return on your CRM investment.
The longer you wait, the more serious and costly it becomes. SoftwareHunt assists you in finding the right CRM – for free. List your need now!
