All About CRMs and How You Should Be Using One To Grow Your Business

A Customer Relationship Manager Can Be a Great Tool for Improving Business and Increasing Sales—Here’s How

A Customer Relationship Manager—or CRM—is a marketing tool that allows you to easily track your sales funnel and see an overview of all of your clients in one place. This data can be a valuable resource that provides understanding in how to increase your sales and retention rates—in turn, helping you grow your business.

Here are a few more reasons why it’s a great idea to take advantage of good CRM software.

1. It’ll Provide Your Team an Overview of Your Entire Sales Funnel

Whether you have 4 or 40 people on your sales team, having an overview of all external-facing activities can be extremely helpful in guiding discussions on new initiatives, encouraging cross-team collaborations, and deciding upon company-wide best practices. By having a centralized place for all of your information with a standard way of inputting contact and other customer information, you’re able to quickly understand where each lead is at, improving both internal and external communication and reducing team inefficiencies and double work. It also reduces the amount of time you spend updating one another in team meetings.

2. It’ll Help You Streamline Your Sales Efforts

Speaking of efficiency, there’s a lot a good CRM can do to help your team out. From automated scheduling to drip campaign set up, using the right CRM can save your team little bits of time—which may add up to be a lot. And it’s a particularly useful tool on the project management side—managers can use this information to assess the efficacy of project strategies and reach out to team members and customers as needed.

3. It’ll Help Solidify Customer Relationships

Having an organized, centralized place to house notes about your contacts allows you and other team members to store and recall interesting details about them at later meetings; these are not only easy icebreakers, they also allow you to get to know your customers on a more personal level—don’t let any customer feel like “just a customer.”

During your last meeting, did your customer mention they’re going on a trip? Do you both root for the same football team? Were they planning to attend their kid’s basketball game later that evening? Make notes in your CRM on these sorts of things so you can ask about them at the next meeting. By recalling personal details with your customers, you can improve the trust in your relationships and differentiate your company from your competitors.

4. CRMs Allow You to Learn and Grow Your Business

When you better understand your customers, you can more clearly see opportunities for cross-selling, in turn increasing possible revenue. And no matter how strong your sales team is, we all lose deals—having categorized reasonings for why certain deals fell through can give you and your team some serious insight into how effective your strategies are. When you can spot trends in the kind of feedback you’re getting from lost customers over time, you’ll have a pretty clear map on where you can improve, whether it’s in adjusting your service listings, your pricing structures, or how you communicate.

Finding the Right CRM for Your Team

There are a number of well-known CRMs on the market today. At efelle, we’re big fans of Hubspot. We love all the great features Hubspot offers and the fact that it takes away our need to subscribe to a series of other systems—everything we need is under one roof.

Other popular CRMs include Salesforce, Infusionsoft, and Pipedrive. Salesforce, in particular, is known for being extremely robust in its sales capabilities and can be useful for a providing your team a broader picture of the sales pipeline—especially when you have a large company.

For a fuller breakdown of why CRMs matter and what the differentiators are between different CRM options, we recommend this great article from PCMAG.

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Here at efelle, our team of digital marketing experts have been in the business of helping businesses grow through development and implementation of effective online marketing strategies for well over a decade. If you're looking for ways to increase leads, boost website conversions, and nurture strong connections with your customers, give us a shout! You can reach out to us at 206.384.4909 or contact us via our online contact form. We're looking forward to hearing from you.