Customer Relationship Management: 7 Ways CRMs Benefit Your Sales Team

8 June 2020

Customer relationship management is immeasurable when it comes to running a successful business.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is all of the activities, technologies, and strategies that businesses use to manage interactions with current and potential clients. It’s the management of the relationship with the customer.

CRM software revenues surpassed database management systems to become the largest of all software markets. Revenues are expected to reach over $80 billion by 2025. If other businesses are spending this much on CRM, then yours should be too.

If you’re on the fence about customer relationship management, find out how it benefits your sales team and grows your business.

1. Customer Profiling Abilities

Customer Relationship Management affords the ability to profile your customers. Knowing as much as you can about your customers, will give you the ability to sell them more and look after them better.

CRM allows you to record all-encompassing information on them: purchase history, hobbies, previous transactions, contact information, account information, support transactions and more. There is no limit to the data that you are able to gather and record on your customers, and potential customers.

Not only does this give you a bank of knowledge to pull information from, but it also empowers your sales team with that knowledge.

Your sales team can be armed with information that might help them make or break a sale for your business. They might arrive at a sales pitch, knowing that the customer has just become a father. Or, that he recently purchased a different service from your business.

Customers are impressed by sales teams that ask less and know more.

2. Customer Service Improvements

Knowing your customer inside and out can only result in one thing. Improved customer service.

If your business is able to track purchase history, maintenance history and service history for your customers. You can plan support calls ahead of time to impress the customer with how well you have a handle on the relationship with them.

Experienced sales representative, when armed with relevant historical information on a client, will be able to solve a problem and find a solution within just a few short minutes, all because your CRM system has an accessible database of logged issues and previous support calls.

3. Functional and Informational Organization

Everything that your customer does with your business should be recorded and filed in your customer relationship management software.

The system of hard filing and paperwork is years gone by,

Your need for CRM with organizational technology is paramount. Where you can accurately search databases, issues, support calls, historical tasks, and customer notes in order to find relevant information on the customer in question.

Your CRM software files this all for you, so that future reference by new sales team members who may be taking over don’t have to attend rigorous training sessions, and hundreds of client meet and greets, and hours of the sales rep to sales rep handover meetings.

If the information you’ve recorded is functional, filed correctly and organized by the relevancy of information with the relevant category tags, your sales team will be empowered. Whether you’re starting a new, or arming sales veterans.

4. Cost Savings

The start-up costs of installing and implementing a CRM software may seem expensive and time-consuming, but the benefits far surpass the costs.

Your sales team will be able to use this system to schedule meetings, record meeting notes, plan their days around geographical locations of clients and more.

CRM will take your sales team from zero to hero.

There is literally no limit to how a sales representative will be able to use the CRM to their advantage. They can record any information, updates of projects and sales in progress, deposits, and payments made.

And they are sometimes even able to do this from their mobile device as well, which means your sales team can spend more time selling and less time in the office updating paperwork.

5. Enhanced Communication

The benefit of enhanced communication means one thing. Any employee, within any department of your business, can assist on a customer support call.

Depending on the levels of access, an employee who answers a call to a disgruntled customer, or even one looking to purchase more services, can access the same information that a sales representative could. Meaning that employee can make the support he gives seamless. Put the customer straight to where they need to be, to get the answers they’re looking for.

Offer incentives when implementing your CRM, so everybody takes the role seriously, and makes a huge effort to understand and have the ability to navigate the system.

6. Analytical Data and Reports

Your Customer Relationship Management software can be used as an accurate reporting tool for your sales team.

If you want to host a weekly sales update meeting? No problem!

Your CRM system will be able to pull activity reports based on a period of your choice, who’s done what tasks this week, which clients have been seen and which haven’t. How many products of which category have been sold.

You can even manage a sales funnel from within your CRM software. To see how many leads are being nurtured to sale, and how many new leads are to be actioned upon as well.

7. Improved Ability to Cross-sell and Up-sell

This follows on from the sales funnel mention above. Once you have a sales funnel that is accurately populated with names of leads, current client, recurring clients, and lost clients.

You can then document what products and services were of interest to them, which were sold and what they may never have seen before.

This is going to give your sales team the improved ability to cross-sell and up-sell your products and services. They will be able to see who might be interested in a product that complements a service they already own, who might need a maintenance call and who might be legible for an upgraded version of what they may already own.

Empower your Sales Team

Only by implementing a customer relationship management system, can you empower your sales team to do more and sell more.

It’s that simple.

But remember, that the CRM software you have in place, will only be as good as the data that is put into it. Have a look at our blog resources to see how easy it is to incorporate CRM with other marketing activities and more.