What is CRM?
Posted By Admin
Category: CRM
Why CRM & why Salesforce?
Are your customers important to you? Do you want to know how your customers buy from you? Do you want to know more about your customers and yourself as a business? If you answered any of those questions in the affirmative – then you need to investigate getting a CRM.
A quality CRM allows you to do many things to manage this customer to business relationship. Some of the things that should be considered
- Sales functionality
- Understand the customer’s journey from lead to closed won deals
- Sales process – even if you don’t have a formal sales process one of the great things about a CRM is that it easily allows you to have one and to modify it as you fond what works for your customers and for you.
- Activity – manage the relationship between sales and customer – what activities are most related to closed deals? What activities accelerate the sales process?
- Service functionality
- Why are customers contacting your service centre? What products do they call about the most? What is the relationship between service levels and future revenue? What are the upsell opportunities when a customer is dealing with your customer service department? Is the sales team aware of an escalated customer service issue prior to reaching out for additional sales?
- Marketing interoperability
- Align your marketing and sales departments & processes. Are the customers that are being targeted by the marketing team the same customers that the sales team is reaching out to? Does marketing understand what makes a customer an attractive target? Can sales give marketing feedback in real-time, automatically?
- Reporting & Analytics
- One of the most important aspects of a CRM is the reporting & analytics capabilities. Effective capabilities here will allow the leadership team to see the business in its’ entirety. In order to get the full value out of a CRM invested, users and buyers need to be aligned. Reporting & Analytics allow the buyers to see this relationship and quickly identify needed changes or areas that should be given increased focus.
- Email and Email tracking
- Which outreach emails to prospects are getting traction? What clients should be more aggressively targeted for follow-up? A quality CRM gives you all of these answers allowing for a more effective use of the Account executive time
- Third party applications
- The best CRM’s have a high degree of interoperability with other business applications. From marketing automation tools, account receivable applications to employee management applications. Your CRM should be able to integrate natively with all kinds of business applications to further leverage your investment and take your business to the next level.
- Ease of use
- A piece of software, any software including CRM applications is only as good as the people using it. Adoption and buy-in are musts if you are to have a high degree of ROI from your CRM. Having a CRM that is a thought and market leader, has people who understand it and can help you leverage it – is critical.
As you can see, a CRM is a critical piece of the business infrastructure. Frontier Data Solutions believes that Salesforce is the best, most flexible and popular CRM in the industry. The best CRM paired with a team who is dedicated to your success makes for a powerful combination.
Reach out to us today to learn more