What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?
The primary objective of CRM is to acquire and retain loyal and profitable customers. A good CRM strategy is about leveraging people, process and technology to optimize every interaction with your customers and prospects. By ensuring that your customers and prospects have a positive experience each time they interact with your business, you increase the chances of turning them into loyal and profitable customers.
CRM Software
Implementing a CRM solution is a critical part of growing your business and improving your competitive advantage. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) will help you sell more to your existing customers and attract new customers all while operating more efficiently. Your CRM solution will capture information about your contacts that will help you market, service and sell more effectively. Additionally, CRM will provide tools that help streamline the sales and marketing process.
Centralize Your Customer & Prospect Data
Centralizing your customer and prospect data is fundamental to a successful CRM strategy. Bringing all the right data into one place is the key to providing visibility into Account and Contact data relevant to your business. Additionally, tracking a history of all interactions, sales, service events and opportunities will further help you drive stronger relationships and additional sales.
Segment Your CRM Data
What you do with your centralized data will be the difference between an average CRM solution and a "game changing" solution. Segmenting your data into unique groups is a critical step to leverage the power of your CRM database. You segment your data by capturing unique characteristics about your contacts and accounts. For example you may capture Account Type: "customer", "prospect", "vendor", or "partner". By tracking Account type, you can market and message directly to these groups. You may further segment by "industry", "company size", "products purchased" or "geographical region". Using segment characteristics you can perform powerful searches and then market and message to the companies and contacts.
Market More Effectively
Segmenting helps you find the right contacts, but now what? A good CRM solution should provide you with tools to perform powerful outbound interactions with your contacts using e-mail, letters and the phone. For example you may wish to send a personalized e-mail to your customers in a specific industry to market a specific add-on solution. Unfortunately most CRM solutions focus on centralizing data but fail to provide powerful segmenting and outbound interaction tools.
Work More Efficiently
CRM is a critical part of growing your business and staying competitive. Sell more to your existing customers and attract new customers all while working more efficiently. CRM software will also provide tools that help you manage your accounts, contacts, opportunities, tasks, calendars and marketing efforts.