Why Your Business Needs a CRM to Succeed

What is a CRM?

CRM is More than Software

Though most popularly known as software, such as Zoho, HubSpot, Salesforce, and many other widely adopted platforms, Customer Relationship Management is much more than that. CRM is a robust, fulsome strategy for supporting sales and marketing processes, from lead generation and nurturing to cultivating repeat business and lasting trust.

Beyond the application of technology, it’s a 360-degree strategy for learning about your customers: their needs, preferences, buying habits, and other factors that motivate their purchase. With the right CRM implementation, CRM strengthens customer relationships, moves the shopping journey along, and drives repeat business.

From Business Philosophy to Concrete Strategy

Of course, there’s a major technical aspect to orienting sales and marketing towards effective customer relationship management. That’s why CRM platforms were developed: with proper implementation, these powerful tools allow you to visualize every step of the customer journey and empower sales and marketing teams to serve customers better and meet revenue goals.

Is your business considering CRM implementation? Take a deep dive into the benefits and advantages of CRM platforms, and see how these help you do better business.

The Importance of Customer Relationship Management

The growth of happy, loyal customers is the ultimate measure of success in business. But there’s more to achieving this than simply offering the right products and services with the best deals. 

From browsing and comparing competing offers to checkout and assessing the quality of customer service, the customer journey is defined by multiple interactions that ultimately determine a successful sale. Effective Customer Relationship Management allows you to optimize these interactions, allowing you to meet customers exactly where they are in the shopping journey and build long-term trust. 

In the process, CRM also offers other benefits, such as generating insights for future purchases, refining buyer personas and targeting, and opening new sales channels like direct or e-commerce sales that better serve customer demand. Essentially, CRM is all about understanding customers so that you can be more responsive to their needs.

How a CRM Benefits Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support

1. Alignment and Collaboration

One of the major benefits of CRM implementation is aligning sales, marketing, and customer support teams. This dispels the misconception that sales teams are solely responsible for generating leads and closing sales, as each team plays a role in attracting and nurturing customers.

With a CRM, teams can collaborate in streamlining the customer journey, ensuring that customer needs are met every step. These include developing the right content that nurtures leads or targets common purchasing bottlenecks, and syncing and sharing data to ensure accurate customer information and generate insights for personalizing customer experiences.

2. Better Sales

CRM platforms are often marketed for their importance in building strong sales teams and processes. At the core of this is enhanced lead management that allows sales teams to score and nurture leads according to their interest and track them down the sales funnel. In the process, teams can also uncover stalled leads, develop closing strategies, and inform future lead generation.

Similarly, a CRM also allows sales teams to visualize existing customers and continuously nurture relationships. A key advantage is quickly identifying upselling and cross-selling opportunities to drive sustained and repeat business based on customer data, such as purchase history. In the process, sales and customer support teams can also work together to maintain positive customer experiences based on customer feedback.

3. Effective Marketing

One of the major advantages of a CRM is streamlining marketing strategies, allowing marketing teams to focus on effective channels. A CRM platform can track engagement across various channels, such as website, social media, and referrals, and focus on campaigns that provide the highest ROI.

Marketing teams can leverage these insights to refine content development based on what customers respond to, and capture quality leads most likely to move through the sales funnel. CRM-enabled, data-driven marketing also benefits sales enablement by providing data on qualified leads to sales teams, allowing them to focus on nurturing relationships with potential customers.

4. Personalized Customer Experiences

Following the sales cycle, customer support teams can also leverage a CRM to automate customer touchpoints and improve multichannel customer service across chatbots, feedback surveys, and other follow-up communication tools.

A key benefit of CRMs is making these interactions visible and automating support tickets to quickly address customer issues and ensure consistent customer service across channels. As a result, customer support teams can personalize the customer experience and ensure satisfaction and loyalty.

Top CRM Tools in the Market

As the backbone of effective sales processes, there’s no shortage of CRM tools readily available in the market. Many cloud-based solutions are easily accessible for fast deployment, instantly improving business intelligence and customer trust. But with so many tools to consider, which one is best for you?

1. Zoho

One of the top CRM platforms, Zoho is praised for its excellent mix of features at competitive prices. Zoho also offers integrations with various products to enhance Customer Relationship Management strategies, particularly email marketing campaigns.

2. HubSpot

Another major CRM in the market, HubSpot is known for innovative CRM solutions tailored to small businesses, particularly praised for its intuitive user interface. HubSpot is built on a freemium model, making it a budget-savvy option for small and medium-sized brands, with paid add-ons for advanced functions.

3. Oracle

Known for its 360-degree view of customers in real-time, Oracle is built with essential sales functions, including ordering, fulfillment, renewal, and upsell and cross-sell. This CRM comes with stand-out e-commerce and sales features, including quotes and commissions, order and customer service management, marketing automation, e-commerce platform integration, and sales forecasting that streamline lead-to-revenue pipelines.

4. Salesforce

Regarded as the CRM to beat, Salesforce pioneered many of the functionalities we’ve come to expect from leading CRMs, including the use of AI, collaborative options, and third-party integrations. Salesforce is the leader in advanced features and customizations, with excellent support for workflows across industries.

What CRM is right for my business? Work with Consultus Digital on CRM Implementation

Choosing the right platform is more than a technology investment — it’s just one part of developing a sustainable strategy for responding to customer demands and scaling business for growth that is, above all, built on customer trust.

At Consultus Digital, we do more than deploy a CRM platform across your sales and marketing team. As experienced CRM implementation consultants and Zoho and HubSpot partners, we provide a complete CRM solution with your sales strategy and revenue goals at the forefront. 

Our process begins with understanding your processes and growth objectives to meet your needs with the right CRM tools. From there, our CRM implementation consultants work with your team to provide software training and support, strategies for leveraging your CRM to improve collaborative workflows and cultivate lasting customer relationships. Together, we can ensure that your new CRM is the right fit and responsive to evolving customer demands and market trends.

Are you thinking of investing in a CRM? Discover the benefits and advantages of CRM solutions. Get expert advice from our CRM implementation consultants on the best CRM platforms in the market based on your industry and revenue goals.