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As simple as it sounds, the very fact that you have all the information about each contact in one place makes CRM a super powerful communication tool. Like a cheat sheet that provides easy access to important information, a CRM system gives your sales, marketing and customer service teams a competitive advantage.
Not only do they know a contact’s full name, email, phone number, mailing address, website and social media accounts, but also crucial business facts such as a contact’s position in the company, his or her relationships with other contacts in your database, the language he or she speaks and even his or her date of birth. With all this information at your fingertips, personalizing your communications with a contact will be a breeze.
Second, with the help of CRM, you can save all the activities, projects, sales, live chat messages, email exchanges, invoices, orders, contracts or customer service requests that a contact has ever been involved in. In other words, with a CRM system you know better who your contacts are and what they want.
Nobody wants to do business with a faceless crowd. Everyone wants to deal with a perfect audience.
This can be done by segmenting contacts (customers and prospects) into target groups. And there’s hardly anything that does segmentation better than a CRM.
CRM allows you to organize data into categories and criteria so that you can easily create targeted lists. Using such segmented lists for sales and marketing allows you to run specific customer marketing campaigns (and account-based marketing campaigns) and analyze your sales process and lead pool.
Knowing who you’re addressing can help you consciously fine-tune your offer, your tactics, and even your sales pitch!
In a nutshell, a good CRM system helps you to better know who is really interested in what you have to offer, who is still on the fence, and who is cold as ice.
Besides being a great asset in finding and nurturing your potential and new customers, CRM is also a great tool for keeping your existing customers happy. A CRM system offers a handful of “customer retention” benefits: it helps you keep your promises by reminding you of appointments or when to send follow-up emails.
But what’s the real trick here is that CRM can also push you to reach those customers who haven’t been contacted in a while, and may be feeling neglected. After all, retaining an existing customer is 6 to 7 times cheaper than acquiring a new one, claims the report by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company.
Probability of Selling to Existing vs New Customer To maintain your customers’ interest, a CRM system can also help you orchestrate your marketing activities: send email campaigns, free trial offers or post-purchase customer surveys, etc. – all at the right time!
We feel more confident when we know what to expect.
The same goes for companies. It’s easier to cross-sell or upsell a customer if you’ve tracked their buying behavior. And since one of the key benefits of a CRM system is that salespeople can sell more and faster, salespeople can anticipate customer needs by accessing the history of customer interactions throughout the customer journey.
Knowing a contact’s purchase history – what they bought and when, what contracts they were offered, what buying habits they exhibited, and even how they became your customers can help you be proactive and come up with new or better offers at the right time! A CRM system is also indispensable in providing good customer service. Access to the interaction history makes it easy to provide timely customer service.
With just a few clicks you will know if a contact had problems with your product, how their service request was handled and whether they were satisfied or not. And if they’ve complained about something in the past, now’s your chance to restore your reputation and provide a much better customer experience.
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