Whether you’re doing business with customers or clients, managing such relationships can benefit your company. Improved customer satisfaction and engagement can lead to a better reputation and revenue.
You can utilize your customer relationship management tool to ensure that you’re putting as much effort into developing these connections. While it won’t compensate for poor services or products, it can turn good results into excellent ones.
According to some studies, 91% of medium-sized companies utilize CRM for their business. This software’s job is to improve customers’ feelings toward your company, but it can also help you improve your internal processes.
What is CRM?
Customer relationship management, or CRM, is software that has the role of helping companies deepen their relations with their customers and clients. They aren’t limited to one industry. Marketing agencies, tech, financial and accounting companies can find various uses for CRM.
Every business can benefit from a better connection with its customers and process automatization.
1. Helps connect with the right customers
As a company developing software or offering various services, your audience can be broad. Whether you’re working directly with clients or individuals who use your product, you need to understand your customers and effectively target them. The power of CRM lies in its ability to give you extensive insight into every customer.
If you’ve gathered information about your company’s most common types of customers, you can run marketing campaigns accordingly.
Let’s say one of your products is a graphic design tool. Your potential customers can be:
- Design agencies
- Individuals that want such software for a hobby
- Digital artists
- Freelancers
Each group has specific needs, and the same ads don’t attract them. For example, design agencies are looking for affordable packages for multiple people, while artists and freelancers want to get as many tools as possible for the least amount of money.
CRM is there to help you segment your audience and tailor marketing campaigns for each of those groups separately. This software can help you save money, as you won’t waste it on campaigns targeted toward uninterested people.
2. Increases productivity
Recently, we’ve seen many people talking about how ChatGPT will replace human employees on a large scale. While that probably won’t happen, many jobs require minimal effort, yet much time can easily be automatized with such software. This can help specialists in different industries focus more on more important activities.
With CRM, you can automatize tasks such as contact information hunting, scheduling, and posting on social media. Instead of paying a person to do one of the mentioned tasks for several hours, they only need to spend time managing databases and ensuring that CRM works correctly.
The main problem with repetitive and time-consuming tasks is that they’re often dull and can negatively impact your employees’ morale. No one enjoys doing the same functions for hours, especially when it doesn’t significantly impact the company’s performance.
By transferring these tiring tasks from your employees to software, you can expect an increase in their mood and productivity.
3. Supports your email marketing campaigns
It’s common knowledge that personalized emails have a much better conversion rate. Some of the top Clickfunnels alternatives for agencies include helpful email marketing tools that can help you with both prospecting and doing outreach.
Just like with employee productivity, CRM can automate important email marketing tasks and increase your campaigns’ effectiveness. For example, if your company has a tech blog that sends newsletters related to your niche or your software, you can automate it using CRM.
Every time a new user subscribes to your newsletter, you can send a customized welcome mail that includes valuable deals or information. If you’re a company that does business with clients, you can increase the effectiveness of your outreach campaign.
Humans are prone to errors, and even though it’s not hard to duplicate the same email template and send it to several people, automated software is much less likely to make a mistake. You only need to provide an email list to the service, and you can schedule emails however you like.
If you don’t get a response to your first email, which happens more than often, it’s valuable to send a follow-up email. This type of email is usually sent as a response to the initial pitch, and they are often shorter, and their goal is to bump the discussion. Customer relationship management software can send follow-ups automatically after a set amount of days.
You wouldn’t want to send emails to uninterested companies and customers when doing email marketing. CRM software often has analytic tools that give insight into open and click-through rates. With this data, you can effectively tailor your campaigns and target clients and customers.
You can automate a message that gives a one-time deal to everyone that tries to unsubscribe from your list. For example, if you ever subscribed to a newsletter from an online store, you probably had the chance to receive a birthday discount; this was probably the work of a CRM.
4. Improves team collaboration
Collaboration of team members is the key component of many successful companies. Customer relationship management software can come with many tools that improve collaboration between individuals and teams on multiple levels.
Both remote and traditional companies utilize some form of workspace tool to communicate effectively; CRM usually has such integrated features. However, there can be some barriers to collaboration even with ways to communicate textually or through a video call.
Tech companies can have different teams working on a single project, requiring real-time document insight. CRM with such features is an excellent choice for companies of various sizes.
Document sharing is beneficial if you have team members in different time zones. For example, imagine that you need to start working on a project as soon as possible, but you have to wait for a co-worker in the opposite timezone to give you access to a document.
So instead of making a phone call or contacting other team members, you’ll be able to access required files from a central repository. In addition, task management features are a great way to ensure that each individual is up-to-date with the current state of every project. Overall, feature-rich CRM can replace multiple workplace tools and save you some money.
5. Tracks sales
Tracking your sales can require professional staff and resources. Many CRM platforms have features that are specialized in managing your sales. Small businesses can significantly benefit from utilizing this as it can help them save money on finance specialists and grant them better insight into their performance.
Each sale isn’t just a simple click of a button by the customer or the client. From the initial contact between your company and the other side to the transaction itself is a long road. Therefore, you would want to track where your sales usually come from and optimize your processes accordingly.
For example, if you barely get any leads from social media platforms but spend a lot of money on social media marketing, you can focus your funds on other options.
Statistics and forecasting can help plan your future finances and ventures as a company. For example, sales forecasting is done by calculating your company’s past performance and the medium revenue achieved in a specific period.
Tech companies’ sales aren’t related to seasons or similar sources, so you won’t have to make predictions about certain parts of the year. However, tracking your sales over extended periods is essential for tracking your progress regardless of the industry.
CRM is a beneficial tool for your tech company
What’s the point of having the best product in the world if nobody has heard of it? With CRM software, you can improve your popularity and marketing campaigns. Bringing new customers and enhancing relationships with current ones is straightforward if you’re using the right tools.
However, to make the most out of this software, you need employees who are proficient with it. While hiring more people can seem costly, CRM can reduce various expenses and potentially increase your revenue.
