To Grow your Business invest in CRM for a great Customer Experience before Marketing
Your business can grow without Marketing but will die without Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Exceptional Customer Experience is the key to making customers for life and successful business growth. The best CRM can help grow your business.
Let’s talk Marketing
Digital Marketing is all the rage these days, so we all have heard Inbound Marketing, Social Media Marketing, SEO, PPC, and the list goes on…
Then there is the website, content writing, Email Campaigns, blogs, videos, SEO, PPC, Back Links, and much more… It is always evolving so that even the ‘experts’ have a hard time creating and maintaining the best strategy.
I should know, I have spent tens of thousands of dollars with Marketing Agencies without significant results to show.
This year, I spent hundreds of hours learning and testing best practices. I have learned platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, Youtube, Medium, and many more.
Now, I am on a mission to write several pieces of content every week. The goal is to share my experience and learning of the last two decades in CRM Consulting and Support, with business leaders.
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Success in closing business from Marketing is harder than we think
The investment of time and effort does not guarantee success. All my hard work, effort, and money can go to waste if the right strategies are not applied.
Marketing, when done right, connects with and engages people who are looking for the products and services we offer. Success means a steady follow of new leads.
The thing to remember is, these are leads and converting them to business will be a different endeavor.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Another tool for Sales and Marketing teams is Customer Relationship Management (CRM).
CRM helps businesses manage and improve lead conversion, customer relationships, and customer service. It is an essential tool for managing leads and closing opportunities. It is also critical in onboarding customers and fulfilling their needs for life.
Exceptional Customer Experience delivered via the best CRM makes Customers For Life
With the correct CRM excellence in upselling, reselling, and customer service is possible. It helps the users to stay organized, efficient, and effective.
We all know, Exceptional Customer Experience Makes Customers for Life.
Customers For Life bring revenue and profit growth opportunities for life.
Repeat Business is a significant source of growth and profit for any company.
Upselling to current customers bears fruit with less investment of time and effort.
Trust, rapport, and institutional knowledge earned from serving them before make future sales less work.
It takes 5-6 times less effort and expense to sell to a current customer than to a new prospect.
Generating new opportunities does not cost thousands of dollars, and hundreds of hours of marketing. These opportunities are won by providing exceptional customer experience.
Another benefit of providing exceptional customer experience is referrals. Referred opportunities have a high rate of closing. Referred leads are warm introductions. They help remove the barrier to entry in meeting the decision-makers. They also help in gaining vital inside information about the job. CRM helps manage relationships with referred prospects and win the opportunities.
Networking is another source of new business that does not cost too much. It brings social and intellectual benefits as well. CRM enables management and nurturing of network relationships.
A company can grow and thrive without a significant marketing effort. But it cannot succeed in the long term without a robust CRM.
CRM is a must for every business. Marketing can be optional.
When investing in Marketing, CRM has to be ready to nurture and close the opportunities created.
So we find, CRM before Marketing
Any CRM won’t do; it has to be the best CRM for the business.
The best CRM, supporting well planned and executed business processes, makes customers for life.
It enables business growth for life and creates organic sources of new business.
Surviving and thriving are hard without investing time, energy, and resources in the best CRM.
Features of the Best CRM
Let’s take a few minutes to review some essential elements of the best CRM for your business:
- Collect, secure, and store leads, prospect, opportunities, customer, product, vendor, contracts, and other vital customer data.
Every business is different, and each one has different needs. Any CRM that limits how many contacts, fields, or processes you can create is not good, whereas the best CRM serves your business needs without arbitrary limitations. - Provide various integrations to enable automatic data update/entry from different areas of business or online data warehouses.
Data entry is time-consuming. Today, an average salesperson spends one hour a day doing data entry. That is one hour less time they are spending closing sales. The best CRM allows you to integrate with other business applications and your website to automatically update data. It helps the sales team work efficiently. Any CRM that puts limits on how much and how often you can update data is not the best CRM.
- Manage and Report on Lead to Close sales cycles for an increase in closed sales.
Reporting provides vital information to decision-makers, and Business Process Automation helps save time and avoid mistakes in the sales cycle. The best CRM has robust reporting and extensive options to automate business processes.
- Scalable as the business grows and evolves.
Today businesses evolve at a faster rate than ever. Tools supporting enterprises have to be scalable and change with time. CRM is no exception. It is most vital for it to be that way.
- Readily available and reliable support, training, and service providers.
Support, user training, and other specialized services help keep CRM relevant and useful over time. The best CRM has a healthy amount of options available for support and other services.
Conclusion
All the hype around marketing these days would have some believe that is the only way to generate good quality leads to grow a business. In reality, it is a complicated, time-consuming, and expensive exercise.
Investing time, effort, and money into the best CRM for your business will bring better ROI, long-lasting growth, and loyalty of your customers.
CRM has to fit your business needs. Pick carefully and then commit to making the culture shift to support it being used. Successful companies train their teams to practice: ‘If it is not in CRM, it did not happen’.
We are here to help
I hope these points will help you make a better decision. There are a lot of options. Every business has to choose the one that is best for them.
Do you have a CRM?
If yes, is the CRM best for your business?
We can help you find the best CRM for your business.
Have reliable support and training for your CRM?
We have over two decades of experience in implementing and supporting some of the best CRMs.
We can help you identify and put in place the best one for your business. Contact us.
Click here to learn more about the CRM solutions we offer.
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