The Ultimate CRM Management Guide

You probably must have heard about CRM, i.e., customer relationship management. Nowadays, most businesses optimise it to manage their existing and potential customers.

Apart from working with customers, it also has tremendous benefits that can stand out your business in marketplaces and help create a good command over sales & marketing.

Approximately 20% of the salesperson never even heard about CRM software, and 40% still use manual strategies like Excel sheets and spreadsheets to update their customers' information. So in this modernized world, why go manually if you have many automation techniques to adopt? 

This guide is specially created to inform you about every aspect related to CRM management.  And how can you optimize your business with this tremendous tool? 

What do you mean by CRM?

CRM denotes customer relationship management. Its main objective is to manage the data of existing and potential customers and increase sales revenue. It also covers many processes of businesses like managing campaigns, email marketing, workflows, and many other things. 

Imagine an intelligent database where you have to update information one time(phone calls, emails, contact details). It will provide you with a complete insight into the dashboard. 

It also helps in analyzing the user's journey, user activities, and lead acquisition. Relating your business with customers and engaging them with your services is the biggest aim for every successful business.

Every business always requires innovative tools to achieve a small or large milestone. The CRM software allows you to target the right marketing strategies to generate integration in your data. Free versions are also available for your convenience so that you can test their optimization in streamlining tasks, assigning and tracking deals.

Importance of CRM

1. Boosts Customer Retention

The CRM system allows you to store every piece of information about your customers and prevents customers from leaving your organization. Good customer retention always shows that the company is progressive.

2. Increase Efficiency in Sales & Marketing

CRM helps maximise your business and provides more targeted and cost-efficient marketing programs. CRM systems also offer better segmentation processes that help to target the more profitable customer groups. 

Five Ways of CRM that improves the Efficiency of sales & marketing

Customers are always fond of buying personalized products compared to generic ones. CRM allows businesses to organize products for individual customers as per their requirements.

CRM solutions hold various viewpoints like product compatibility & eligibility, validation, up & cross-selling.

3. Social media marketing

CRM with social media integration helps businesses run and track social media campaigns, measure their effectiveness, increase sales, resolve customer complaints, and more.

Types of CRM software

1. Operational CRM

Operational CRM mainly leads three areas- sales, marketing, and service. It allows storing customer information, deals, and ushers in a unified repository. 

This CRM works upon three types of automation: sales force, marketing, and service.

2. Analytical CRM

Analytical CRM mainly coordinates with operational and collaborative CRM tools. It helps in managing all kinds of back-office operations. Its associated data can come from many different channels, like social media, phone calls, live chat, your company website, purchase records, etc.

It also helps in the process of segmenting your customers, predicting trends, and helps to plan your marketing and targeted sales strategies for the future.

3. Collaborative CRM

This type of CRM helps interlink different organizations with customer service and maintains communication bandwidth. It includes various company divisions such as marketing, sales, customer service, technical support, external customers, vendors, and distributors.

It also initiates workflow processes through organizational structure and hierarchies. It comprises two parts- interaction management and channel management. A collaborative CRM is an excellent option for managing massive information across departments.

CRM implementation examples

Here are the top examples of CRM implementation that will motivate you to adopt CRM solutions.

1. Coca-Cola CRM

Coca-Cola uses CRM to promote collaboration and sort the customer's queries effectively. By adopting CRM software, every employee of the Coca-Cola team quickly rectifies issues, monitors customer behaviour, and leads social media campaigns for their product promotions and offers.

With the help of a mobile inbuilt CRM app, team members can access customer history anytime and anywhere.

2. Amazon CRM

Amazon is one of the vast online shopping platforms. The main reason behind this is Amazon's CRM system. It has a well-defined CRM infrastructure that manages all the customer's information purchasing and works upon the customer's online experience. 

It also enables tracking customers' purchases and browsing history: Associate marketing and email campaigns based on the user's interest were also carried out.  Configure your account to set up assets in just one click.

3. Activision CRM

Activision is one of the renowned websites in the video gaming industry that uses CRM-based cloud solutions to connect with different gamers through social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter.

By adopting CRM-based solution, the company reduces customer expenses by 25% and access and resolves 82% of customer-related issues.

CRM implementation strategy to ensure success

1. Involvement of CRM Users at Early Stages

Create an involvement of employees in your company who would be using CRM and are compatible with it. Even if you are well-known for all the implementation processes of CRM, you should discuss with other team members for better results.

2. Prioritization of the need for CRM

Give priority to your CRM needs as per your company's infrastructure and the number of employees. The main focus for implementing CRM solutions is to increase revenues by engaging more and more customers to your organization. 

3. Build up Vital Operational Features within CRM

To quickly implement CRM tools within the user's community, ensure that all the features like daily activity reports, commission calculation reports, approvals, and travel allowance should be built-in CRM software. These all things ensure the transparency of the company's infrastructure.

4. Identify Automation Scope

Adopting CRM solutions ensures that fewer tasks are performed manually. CRM optimization allows all the lessons to be automated and provides the best results to the user. By implementing CRM, you put your people's time to use best.

5. Integrity and Efficiency with other Software

Always think about the software you already use that can be implemented in CRM. You want to implement your WordPress website with a backend CRM solution and much other software per your requirement.

Essential features for CRM Execution 

1. 360 Degree Customer View

360-degree customer view is collecting all necessary information related to your customers in one place. There are many benefits of 360-degree customer view, of which some of them we have mentioned below:

• More strategic sales and marketing campaigns.
• Understand customers and their behavior.
• Deliver more personalized shopping experiences.

2. Salesforce Automation

SFA helps take care of some repetitive tasks and becomes more efficient and better at closing deals. The sales team can also work on a more fertile part of their selling job by enabling sales force automation.

3. Customer Support Tracking

Customer support and tracking allow the company to manage interactions with existing and potential customers. Maintain customer interaction using various chat channels such as phone, website chat, applications, and social media messaging.

4. Dashboards and Reporting

CRM dashboards and reporting provide you with accurate time information about your business. They also allow you to customize your KPIs and metrics in real time.

Dashboards can also be generated for different teams, like the marketing, sales, and operations teams. The information provided by these dashboards and reporting is used to analyze your sales and marketing performance.

5. Integration and Workflows

This part allows you to automate your business processes. Automated notifications, alerts, and the exchange of information took the operation to the next level.

Final verdict

It takes a lot of time to develop strong customer relationships and requires a complete focus on improving customers' experience. However, you can effectively and efficiently manage customer relationships by implementing the right strategies and CRM solutions.

Using CRM software and tools can give your business an opportunity to develop a holistic customer relationship. We have provided the complete scenario about CRM.

Now it's your turn to use the right strategies before opting for any CRM tool. Firstly, we would like you to consider free CRM tools and then go with a paid version to better understand the software.

For further queries regarding CRM management, you can reach out to us.

Frequently Asked Questions