CRM—or customer relationship management—is business software that helps individuals and teams maximize their customer communications and sales efforts. CRM isn’t simply an address book. It empowers your team to build relationships more effectively and provide the best customer experience from evaluation to purchase and beyond.
What can CRM do?
When your business first started, tracking customers by email, address books and spreadsheets made sense. But now your company is growing—and more growth means more opportunity to change how you run your business. Right now:
The real problem is that you’re most important data is spread across multiple systems and people, making it difficult to leverage your information and collaborate on sales.
Having to do manual data entry is one of the biggest productivity-killers for sales reps. CRM automates many of these repetitive admin tasks so your team can spend less time typing and more time selling.
CRM also helps you build a standardized sales process, which gives your team a step-by-step roadmap for closing deals and helps to reduce the length of your sales cycles.
Modern cloud-based CRM platforms can be accessed from any device, which means your deals aren’t all stuck in the office. With mobile CRM access and smartphone notifications, salespeople won’t miss anything important, whether they’re on a plane, at a client site, or walking into a meeting.
Sales processes provide the data you need to identify the root cause of stalled deals, take steps to address the problems, and ensure that your team focuses its efforts on the activities that generate the most revenue.
With a CRM, you can automate reminders for your team to reach out to leads at the right time so that potential customers are never lost. Seeing the upcoming actions for every deal removes the guesswork and stress from a sales rep’s day.
Having a more accurate sense of your win rate allows sales managers to dependably forecast how many sales their team will close from a given number of leads and set realistic revenue goals.
A standardized sales process makes training sales reps fast, simple, and nearly foolproof, by showing salespeople what they need to do at every stage of the sale. Even rookie sellers can make an immediate impact once they learn the basic steps in your sales process.
When a sales rep rushes a prospect into a sales stage they’re not anticipating, it can kill the deal and damage the relationship with the buyer. A sales process ensures that sellers don’t advance the sale until the buyer is ready to move forward.