6 ways CRM helps you grow your business

Customer relationships are key to your organisation's growth, so you need to manage them as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Here's how relationship management technology can help you be more connected to customers, improves business performance, and grows your company bigger and faster than ever:

1. Find the right customers.  

You've spent time and resources attracting and generating new leads, but now what? Are they getting passed on to your sales team, and if so, do your reps know which opportunities are the hottest? Time is of the essence when you're small and growing fast. Make the most of your marketing tools — email, social, marketing automation — by connecting them to a CRM platform. Both sales and marketing will have a complete view of leads and prospects so they can create and target engaging communications to turn prospects into customers and reach key decision makers faster.

2. Build more sustainable relationships.

Develop a deep understanding of a customer’s business — beginning with a complete view of their history with your company — and you’ll build a strong relationship founded on trust and mutual success. A CRM system can help an organisation:

• Explore their challenges: Find out what matters to your customers — their goals, challenges, and preferences — at the end of every exchange and make sure you have a follow-up action. Record these notes in your CRM system so next time you can pick up exactly where you left off with a quick review.
• Engage with relevancy: After you understand a customer's business challenges and goals you can recommend appropriate products or special promotions, or other content that's relevant to their business interests, at the right time. With CRM, you'll also know what they've purchased and how they're using your products or services, so you can provide the most relevant content and information.
• Scale your 1-to-1 relationships: As a small (but mighty) business, your customers love you for the personal experiences you provide; but it becomes more challenging to know the details of each and every customer — and when to follow up with them — when high growth kicks in. A CRM platform can host email templates, set up task reminders, and enable phone calls to help you connect with customers faster and easier.

3. Reduce the cost of sales.

New customers are a key ingredient of continued growth, but they’re not easy — or cheap — to come by. The good news is you can offset new customer acquisition costs through sales to your existing customer base. Gain greater visibility into the upsell, cross-sell, and renewal opportunities in your customer portfolio and you’ll see an increase in repeatable sales thanks to the trust you’ve already earned.

A CRM system can help you improve business performance by:

• Improving sales efficiency: Prioritise leads and opportunities that are highly likely to convert and close based on customer interactions with your company.
• Boosting sales effectiveness: Know which customers are engaged and the right time to reach out for optimal response.
• Increasing upsell and cross-sell opportunities: See all the opportunities that are a good fit for add-on deals already in progress.
• Uncovering referral business: Find untapped opportunities in existing relationships instead of paying for dead-end leads or wasting time cold calling.
• Reducing time to close: Instantly align your team on the next steps to close a deal when you have a 360-degree view of your customer.
  

4. Increase employee productivity.

Adopting the right technology frees up your teams from process-heavy tasks and gives them more time to connect with customers. Manual operations like hunting for contact information or entering data can be automated or eliminated from customer-related processes. Automation across sales, service, and marketing will free your employees so they can spend more time talking to prospective customers and strengthening relationships with existing ones, moving the needle for your business.

5. Offer better customer service.

Even the best product is only as good as the service that comes with it — both before and after the sale. Don't hit up your prospects with multiple marketing promotions that will annoy or scare them away. Drop the ball after a sale and you’ve wasted the time and effort that went into winning a valuable customer. When your entire team has immediate access to a customer’s complete history, everyone can quickly provide personalised messages and solutions, with the right resources. Smoother interactions build trust and encourage repeat business.

6. Improve customer retention.

Visibility across all your relationships can help your teams proactively address at-risk accounts and present satisfied customers with new opportunities at just the right moment. With transparency into customer histories, active campaigns, or open cases, you can provide more satisfying purchases and service experiences that keep them coming back for more. Invest your time wisely now, and strong customer relationships will pay dividends for years to come.

Salesforce CRM

Salesforce is the world’s #1 Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. It offers cloud-based applications for sales, service and marketing for small, midsize and enterprise organisations, with a focus on sales and support. It brings together all your customer information in a single, integrated platform that enables you to build a customer-centred business from marketing right through to sales, customer service and business analysis. This gives you more complete understanding of your customers to drive your business’s success.