Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools are beneficial for businesses of all sizes by improving control over customer data, increasing productivity and synergy across teams, improving the use of time and resources as well as the ability to clearly attribute value and ROI to marketing activities. One of the best CRMs available today is HubSpot — find out the benefits of choosing it as your CRM.
Below are some of the main reasons why your business needs a CRM:
1. Streamline your marketing & sales processes
CRM tools can show both the marketing and sales team exactly at what stage the lead is in the buying process. They can even be notified of the lead’s interactions and moves down the funnel so that they don’t lose track of their leads. Being able to see all that activity in one place, helps sales and marketing teams understand better what they both need to be able to reach their goals.
2. All your customer information in one place
CRMs are able to collect data from all touchpoints of your lead’s buyer journey which can help you get a better idea of who your customers are and how they are interacting with your brand and products, for example their location, interests in particular blogs or content offers, their industry etc. This will help your business make more informed decisions when trying to market to and sell to these customers by understanding them better.
3. Managing all communication with your customers
These tools also enable you to manage all communication with your customers in one place — from newsletter emails they are sent, to individual emails they may receive directly from your sales team — it’s all in one place in your CRM. This makes it much easier to improve the customer satisfaction, and be able to provide them with relevant offers when you can see exactly what comms they have received and sent.
4. Marketing automation
Automating tasks, such as repetitive follow-up emails, chatbots and automated workflows can be time-consuming for a person to constantly have to stay on top of, however with a CRM all of those tasks can be automated so that the sales team has more time to sell, and the marketing team has more time to create & improve on their campaigns, while your leads still feel nurtured and supported through their buyer journey.
5. In-depth analysis and reports
CRMs are able to offer you comprehensive reports at the click of a button, making it easy for sales & marketing to see what’s working, and what can be improved. CRMs are always actively collecting data about your leads and their interactions through their buyer journey, so the reporting offered by CRMs is very valuable at analysing your activity and being able to streamline it to increase sales, customer satisfaction and improve ROI.
6. Streamlining customer journey
CRMs will allow you to create workflows that can be customised and streamlined based on whatever criteria you choose for your leads, to help streamline their buyer journey and help to convert them to complete deals or purchases. This will ensure they only receive the marketing communications or advertisements and content that is helpful and relevant to them, which will improve their experience and allow you sales team to better upsell them where and when relevant.
7. Saved time and resources
One of the biggest benefits of implementing a CRM is the huge amount of time and resources saved due to all your sales and marketing efforts as well as customer data being centralised. Your teams will no longer have to spend hours trying to send the same emails over and over again or trying to figure out which customers have already received certain comms and at what sales funnel stages they are at. CRMs simply all of these for you in one place.
8. Better communication between teams
Having all your campaigns, communications, and data in one place makes it much easier for your teams to see what both of them are doing, how it’s affecting potential leads, and what they both need in order to succeed. Having a CRM cuts down the time your teams spend trying to communicate and figure out where certain things might be, or what has been done, as they can easily access whatever they need (you can still of course set different access permissions for different individuals).
9. Improved customer segmentation
As CRMs collect customer data across all their touchpoints in their buyer journey, it means that over time they can collect more sophisticated data & higher volumes of data, which you can use to segment your audience and target them with the most relevant offers for them.
This level of customer segmentation is excessively time-consuming, and often not even possible, without a CRM system in place.
10. Marketing attribution
CRMs make it much easier to attribute value to your marketing activities and see how they affect sales and various KPIs and business goals due to being able to track and synchronise so much of your own data, campaigns, content, and customer data all in once place, ready to be analysed and attributed.
Find out more about marketing attribution here.
Customer Relationship Management systems are valuable to businesses of all sizes, improving the customer’s journey and experience, as well as increasing your productivity and efficiency for both your marketing and sales teams.
Our favourite CRM is HubSpot. Ready to give it a go? Contact us now to see how HubSpot could help your business.
