3 Benefits of CRM or Customer Relationship Management For Your Small Business

Discussing how to transform marketing and sales digitally under different topics may be confusing for some. Isn’t marketing and sales the same? No, they are not. Marketing is different from sales. Marketing does the work of informing and attracting leads and prospects to a business and product/service. Sales, on the other hand, does the work of reinforcing and hammering the value of the company\’s solution to convert prospects into customers. Marketing is all about attracting leads and new customers; sales is about converting the leads.

Even though the two business functions are different, they share the common goal: to generate revenue by attracting leads and converting them into paying customers

What is CRM and what are the objectives of implementing CRM for your small business?

Customer relationship management software can be very useful in helping your business grow by managing the sales processes; right from lead scoring up to enhance long-term customer relationships. Many fast-growing companies now use CRM technology to turn more sales leads into revenue. The management software can help in giving you an overview of your projected sales for a specific period. With such forecasting data, you can effectively plan your marketing campaigns and prepare your business for increases or dips in sales volume.

The first reason why you may want to use a CRM is so that you’d be able to manage your pipeline efficiently.  Nowadays, a pipeline is called a funnel.  While the word gets thrown around a lot, ‘pipeline’ is not just a buzzword; it is an important sales tool. A sales pipeline or a funnel plays an important role in the success of any business. It is an organized, visual way through which multiple potential buyers can be tracked as they move up through different stages in the purchasing process. It can be said to be a visual representation of where prospects are in the sales process. There are usually different stages to a sales process, potential buyers are moved from one stage to the other as they move through the sales process.

Based on the sales pipeline, there are 3 types of leads that can be generated:

1. Hot leads

A hot lead is a qualified lead that is interested in your service/product. This lead is ready to buy and they are ready to make direct contact asking for the sale. This lead meets all the criteria that is required to make a purchase.

• Warm Lead

This lead is still at the stage of decision; their mind is not made up yet. Usually, they are missing one or two criteria that are required to make a purchase. In some cases, the deal breaking factor would the budget.

• Cold Lead

In the case of cold leads, you are still trying to convince them to consider your service/product. This kind of lead requires nurturing to move them through the stages of the sales pipeline. When it comes to converting leads, it is not always an overnight success. There are some leads that would be ready to move through the stages immediately, some are going to require some nurturing. The second objective for transforming your sales digitally is to streamline or capture your sales efficiently.

Customer relationship management is a way to manage your sales pipeline or funnel on a centralized location digitally and promote your team’s interaction with your customers seamlessly. Its main objective is to acquire new customers and keep them. Internally, it is the best tool to measure your sales team’s performance.

Here are the Benefits of CRM or Customer Relationship Management:

1. Consolidated/centralized data.  We all have been tired of getting customers’ master list or sales information from different sources. Each salesperson has their contacts stored in a spreadsheet locally and some of them store it in the cloud. One major benefit of CRM is to have a centralized location that you can always refer to in real-time.
2. Customer acquisition history.  A good sales management system is when you have a clear history trail of a customer from how you acquired them as a lead/prospect down to closing the sale. With CRM, you can be able to browse each customer and its historical information anytime.
3. Better decision making and strategy.  Imagine a pipeline dashboard that shows how many leads were acquired for the week, how many moved from cold to hot, and how many customers were converted into sales. With this information, you can be able to decide where to focus on, what strategy to implement, and what to do with your performing and non-performing salespersons.

So for your digital transformation initiative, implementing a digital CRM for your business is a good way to grow your sales and keep customers. As a bonus, here is a business process template in implementing a CRM.

1. Define the sales team. Depending on the size of your organization, you should define your team in groups. Define the group’s team leader, and the sales manager on top of all. This is to give you transparent accountability.
2. Capture leads. There are several ways to capture leads. Manually encode or import them in your centralized database. Automate them from your digital marketing campaigns such as email campaigns, website inquiries, or from your social media channels. There are online interface programs that automate the importing of a lead from your website.
3. Assign leads. The sales team leader should manage the assignment of leads based on your defined rules or policies. Some companies assign leads based on location, territory, or industry expertise.
4. Manage pipeline. Require your team to record all sales activities in the CRM from quotation preparation, meeting schedules, minutes of the meeting, call logs, follow-ups, and next action.
5. Manage and keep existing customers. CRM does not end in the sales conversion. A good sales management system is to keep existing customers by consistently providing them with useful information about your niche, offering sales promos, discounts, and upselling other products. If you are a service company, you may want to provide them a channel for support and inquiries.

For your reference, here are some of the best CRM in 2020 according to PCMag:

1. Salesforce
2. Freshsales
3. Zoho CRM
4. Hubspot CRM

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