Considering a way to improve your relationships with the customers using CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and marketing automation platform is a smart decision. It can significantly redefine your business process and make it more efficient, result driven and customer centric. However, CRM is a method-driven process where proper planning and dedication is requisite. Following is an outline of how you should strategies CRM implementation to your business so it can bring customers closer to you.
Ravi Kumar, Director CRM Consulting at Cubastion Consulting says,”Before going through the strategies and guidelines of how to implement quality Customer Relationship Management in your business, let’s walk through why a company should be interested in quality customer relationships in the first place.”
It Gives You an Insight on Your Customer’s Sales Behaviour
The ability to understand your customer is the highest priority for any business. A company that understands and cares about its consumers knows how people feel about what’s being offered to them. CRM program inspires consumers to get more involved with the business and express what their needs are. It gives an organization opportunity to cater their needs better and in a timely manner.
Increases Sales Rate
Once you and your customer understand each other well, the course to profitable sales becomes a natural progression. Your company can customize best solutions for the consumers and this is an obvious path to sales hike.
Companies Get an Edge During Crisis
A bad customer experience is something every company dread; however, there are situations where your customers are not satisfied with your service or solution. These are times to cash a good relationship with your consumers. Healthy terms with customers make them much calmer during a critical situation and gives you time to handle it better.
To implement CRM in your business, the first step in streamlining your business with the software. In order to achieve this, here are the plans you need to implement:
Organizing Contacts
Organizing contacts and other data are important before you import it into the system. This is to make sure that you don’t miss out on important data sets. Any loss of data in the process will cause a deformity in reporting, segmentation and overall marketing and sales efforts.
How your contacts are organized? Does each of your sales person has a separate list of contacts? Are contacts grouped based on location? These are some of the questions you need to go through before implementing a CRM software in your business structure.
Segregating Contacts and Determining Actions Accordingly
Segregating your contacts and collecting information is crucial to make accurate sales and marketing strategies. Collecting data about your clients help you mine important contacts and help you personalize communication. All user-defined fields should be identified and setup before importing contacts to you CRM. Actions like sending personal emails, follow up, presentations, phone calls, meetings, sending contracts and invoice should be a part of workflows.
Understand Your Lead Flow and Traffic
It is essential to know where your web traffic and leads are coming from. It plays a crucial part in understanding your audience and planning the sales and marketing strategy of your company. You should know whether the leads are coming from organic SEO, referrals or PPC. Your company should strategies how a customer is being acknowledged by your organization.
Determine your Goals for CRM and Marketing Automation Implementation
To understand why you are investing in CRM technology will guide you to implement it better in your system whether you want to decrease the sales time with lead nurturing or you want to divide your audience and focus on marketing campaigns. Establishing firm goals of marketing automation and CRM will make it easy for your team to see the benefits of incorporating this new technology.
Bring Entire Team On Board
CRM and marketing automation are technologies that require your entire team’s attention. Someone from your team should be able to spearhead the implementation process. This person will be responsible for bringing all the departments together and helping everyone get their hands on the new technology providing them will in-depth training.
Defining your Business Process
One of the most difficult prospects of implementing CRM and marketing automation is determining what exactly is your business process. This helps setting up the technology properly. If the CRM technology is not incorporated right, the results will not be impressive.
Investing in CRM is one of the smartest moves for any business, but you have to remember that it doesn’t happen overnight. You need to think, plan and then execute for better results.
