TOP 5 Reasons to Use a CRM System

A integrated database of interested parties, potential customers and clients

If your company’s sales department works hand in hand with the marketing and customer service departments, then you will certainly understand the power of a unified database of potential customers, clients, partners and competitors, which has a 360-degree view of all the activities you or a colleague are involved in. It would be odd if an employee of the sales department called a potential customer and didn’t know that the marketing department sent him a greeting on Midsummer just the day before, or the marketing department sent an advertising offer to the customer without knowing that the customer service department had just received a complaint from that same customer.

If this information is in three different systems that aren’t integrated with each other, then it is no wonder that a customer becomes annoyed about the uncoordinated actions of your company’s departments. Are you wondering if it still makes sense to enter the same information three times, in three different systems?

Standardised processes for handling interested parties and sales opportunities

Often, no one can tell if there were 10 or 15 people contacted this week, what campaign they came from and whether they actually became customers. However, if there is a standardised process for processing interested parties and sales opportunities, that would be great. It is possible to configure the company’s processes in the CRM system, and to tell the sales manager what data needs to be clarified, what documents need to be prepared to change the status of the opportunity, and then they no longer have to foresee what else needs to be accomplished to complete this sales opportunity. When closing an opportunity as lost, you need to indicate which competitor you lost to, so that you can analyse the outcome against your competitors.

Great tool for generating parties interest

“Cold calls” were widespread some time ago, but now more and more companies are rejecting these contacts because people who make decisions about purchasing products and services are very busy and cannot just be called. It would also be quite tedious to call and offer products/services without knowing if the offer might be interesting to that company. Inaccurate targeting could result in a rather sad outcome, where your company gains an unwanted reputation. Social networks, Google AdWords remarketing, advertising on news sites, email campaigns, company websites, and blogging can give us different targeted opportunities to attract interested people. When we notice a specific person has opened the campaign email and looked at six sections of the website about a specific product, we would then pick up the phone and contact the potential customer.

Detailed selection and marketing lists

If it is necessary to select all the potential customers with more than three technical units, and a turnover of more than EUR 2,000,000, then maintaining the data in a CRM system would take only a few minutes. If you plan to send a campaign email to selected potential customers, you will need to create a marketing list, which could be static or dynamic. You can also choose data to organise your calling campaign and record the campaign responses. The selection criteria could be whatever is maintained in the database.

Dashboards

If you have long dreamed of an information panel where you could see all the calls, tasks, meetings, opportunities, contracts, orders – for all sales managers, regions, and countries, then this CRM system would be a dream come true! All this can be configured by yourself or consultants in different segments and for different periods.

In conclusion, I want to emphasise that a CRM system is not just a system for streamlining sales processes but a model for managing relationships with potential and existing customers.

Using technology, alongside the CRM system, it is possible to organise, automate and synchronise sales, marketing and customer service processes.

From my personal experience, I can say that using a CRM system has helped me:

• to focus on the most important sales opportunities;

• to spend more time communicating with customers and potential customers;

• not to lose those people who express interest and other opportunities in the sales process;

• to cooperate with colleagues in maintaining data quality;

   

• to “catch” those interested at a time when they are still exploring our company’s website.

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