Author: Artemy

Having clear strategies, effective inbound marketing activities and a clear sales process is critical to business success. Technology nowadays plays a vital role in altering the consumer landscape and how people interact with your product and brand.

Generally, people are more self-aware, better informed, and further along the sales funnel when they engage with your business. When you distinguish exactly what your prospects want, you can focus on catering your marketing strategy directly to them.

Understanding Your Audience

These days, consumers desire a personalized experience when interacting with your brand. This can be difficult to individualize due to the diversity of people that exists around us. When capturing information for prospects, youll receive plenty of data, and if that data is maintained on an ongoing basis, it can be leveraged effectively in your marketing and sales tactics. Using a CRM assists in filtering the relevant data based on user defined fields that can suit your business needs and help understand your audience personas.

You can leverage your CRM to:

1. Gain easy access to information from address books
2. Create notes/follow up tasks and track the most recent interactions
3. Take your campaign on the go with mobile accessibility

These features ensure your sales team is constantly connected, which results in engaging these prospects in the correct manner. Having everything in one database and being able to communicate effectively with your prospects can be done most productively through a CRM, resulting in better team efficiency and satisfied prospects.

Improving Productivity

One of the most important outcomes of implementing a CRM system is improved productivity in the workforce. Anytime your company acquires new information regarding a prospect, this information can be stored within the CRM, which enables your entire team to view it all in one place. These tracked communications are in real time which gives your team insight into how the deal is progressing. 

There are other ways CRM can increase your teams productivity as well. If a prospect fills out a form on your website, you can automatically schedule an email to go out containing the information they requested, such as username and password and links to other helpful resources.

This eliminates the need to individually follow up and frees up time for your sales team to resolve questions other prospects may have which improves efficiency. 

Adopting the right CRM allows your team to be free from process-heavy tasks, giving them more time to provide high quality customer service. Manual operations such as physically checking employee availability and scheduling phone calls is improved through CRM technology. 

The calendar feature within Maximizer allows you to check your teams availability, schedule meetings and book rooms all from one system, therefore improving the internal efficiency across departments. 

Finally, a CRM system can assist your marketing, sales and customer service departments stay well connected through shared tasks and responsibilities. For example, Maximizer CRMs hotlist feature allows you and your team to view important tasks with one simple click. Look at your teams urgent tasks due right away and easily monitor when each task is completed. This simple feature ensures you will never miss a deadline again.

To Conclude

In today’s fast-paced business environment, having a CRM system is crucial to improving audience understanding and productivity, resulting in better customer service, enhanced team efficiency, and increased sales. With the right CRM, businesses can easily capture, store, and analyze customer data, gain real-time insights into deal progress, automate follow-up tasks, and streamline operations across departments. By adopting a CRM, companies can build deeper customer relationships, increase their competitive edge, and drive long-term growth.

Contact management is an integral part of any organization, and doing it well helps you form strong relationships with people and businesses alike. Proper contact management within a CRM can assist your company in the following ways:

• It keeps your sales and customer service teams aligned by keeping track of ongoing conversations that are latched to the history of each contact in your database.
• It builds and maintains company reputation by allowing you to respond to customer complaints in a timely manner, drawing a positive brand image.
• It keeps your contact records updated and widely shared across the organization.

Collection and maintenance of contacts can be tricky, complicated and time consuming without a CRM. If the process takes longer than expected, it can lead to decreased productivity, frustration and loss of valuable customer information. Three aspects of a CRM which will help improve contact management that we want to draw your attention to are:

• Address Book
• Mobile Accessibility
• Automated data entry

In this article, we’ll explore how these three aspects of a CRM can help you build stronger relationships with your customers and boost your business productivity.

Address book

An address book allows you to access, recall and share information effortlessly by storing key details within the CRM database. Key information like contact addresses, date last contacted, and emails received can be tracked with this feature. This keeps your team well connected and provides insights into where your leads are in the lifecycle stage of the sales process. 

All this centralized data helps you better understand your contacts and build deeper relationships with them. Your team will be well prepared for client calls, as they can scan through contacts interaction history and see what was discussed in previous communications. This allows your team to connect with them right where they left off and at the right time. 

With an online address book, your team will be more prepared, better informed and equipped to connect and create lifelong relationships with your contacts.

Mobile Accessibility

Technology has evolved and improved much more in the last 5 years, with cutting edge and progressive innovations, which includes improved mobile accessibility. With a steady rise in the availability of mobile apps on the apple store and google play store, we have become much more attached to our portable devices.

Mobile CRM also helps you pull specifics about contacts right into the palm of your hands. Whether youre travelling between meetings, or simply busy with multiple tasks, you have access to your CRM from your mobile device. Wherever you are in the world, you can access information such as notes, calendars, and future events even when out of the office. 

Mobile CRM also helps you stay on task and be well-prepared. Employees can schedule appointments or see whos available for discussion about important topics from their cell phone. In addition, if you receive important information or discover new opportunities, this can be shared quickly with your team. This in turn keeps your sales team well connected and ensures youre not missing out on the next opportunity. 

The mobile CRM market is expecting a growth of 11% this year, rising from US$13.5 billion in 2018 to in excess of US$15 billion by the end of this year. The desire for people to connect with their contacts through their mobile devices is increasing. Long gone are the days where employees are required to sit at their desk in order to process and analyze contact information. Thanks to convenient, user friendly mobile CRM, your sales team can stay connected in real time throughout the workday.

Automated Data Entry

Manual data entry can be time consuming and has the potential of human errors, resulting in inaccuracies and confusion amongst your team. By reducing the time for data entry with CRM and pre-built integrations, teams can focus on high-value tasks instead of typing information into the database. 

Not only is data entry time consuming, but it can also cost money. With so many automated processes, you dont need as many employees to assist you. This means less money spent on salaries, which allows you to spend it on other areas of your company. 

Hiring employees specifically to keep your data organized can waste time and be expensive. Instead, that time could be better spent in closing deals, generating revenue and satisfying customers. With CRM, data is automatically organized depending on your preferences, freeing up time for you and your team to prioritize high value tasks.

Conclusion

Managing contact information is critical for business growth and success. Using a CRM will help keep this information updated, organized and accessible across your entire organization. You can improve efficiencies across departments, prevent the daily hassle of updating contact records and much more, all with our one-stop CRM solution.

According to Capterra, some 32% of SMEs still rely on the capture, storage and tracking of vital customer data and interactions in spreadsheets, with a further 20% via email platforms and 15% using manual methods.

These data management practices are certainly reflected in the conversations we have with our prospects and new customers. They are increasingly frustrated with their existing solutions are seeking better ways to manage their customer information and interactions but, as Capterra also observes, many are still reluctant to invest in CRM.

In this blog we look at the value data can bring to a business, the limitations of relying on manual methods, as well as the benefits of better data management with CRM.

Data-driven organizations are outdoing their competition, are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, 6 times as likely to retain customers, and 19 times as likely to be profitable as a result (McKinsey Global Institute).

Although CRM remains the fastest growing software market today, expecting to reach $80 billion by 2025 (Source: Grand View Research), successful adoption is a challenge for many companies, with some research statistics reporting anything up to a 70% failure rate.

There are many reasons for CRM not delivering as promised, with user adoption often cited as a key factor, which can often be overlooked during the product evaluation, design or implementation stages of project.

In this blog we discover ways to set the odds for success in your favour, better engage with stakeholders and deliver higher user adoption rates and successful CRM. and it all starts at your CRM evaluation stage!

Leadership

Often within a business, the need for CRM is driven by one or two individuals with previous knowledge and experience of the value and benefits that CRM can bring to improving productivity and business growth. 

This may be a Head of Marketing or Sales who tasks their IT representative or one of their own team to research the market and focus CRM needs on just their own department. 

This may be a good starting point, but it is critical to consider the wider business needs and involve managers early in the process, for input and buy-in to the proposal. Its important to ensure the senior team are fully conversant with the benefits that CRM can bring to both their individual departments as well as the wider business. This will help ensure that decisions to progress are well informed and based on more than just a basic cost analysis. 

Early commitment from all managers will help build project credibility and confidence, drive the required changes in company culture and deliver ongoing, engagement and use of the CRM by their teams.

Stakeholder Involvement

Forrester Research found that 22% of all reported problems encountered on the road to successful CRM implementation were people-related or linked to user adoption. Therefore, its imperative to include your wider stakeholder community early in the process. 

• Have a clear plan of how you intend to engage with your stakeholders. BRS have a great Five-Step Approach to Stakeholder Engagement which is easily transferable to any B2B business. 
• Set up a multi-disciplined project group to assess and define key CRM requirements for the whole business, gathering information from their colleagues and disseminating it to the group for discussion and action. 
• Include end-user representatives from each department to secure early engagement and longer-term commitment. Deep practical knowledge of existing data management practices, customer interactions, activity workflows, challenges, productivity inefficiencies and improvement opportunities will result in a more comprehensive needs analysis, product evaluation, product design and implementation, all important in delivering effective CRM. 
• Set clear goals, timescales, roles and responsibilities for the task group, providing a motivational environment and encouraging positive communication to the wider stakeholders, building stronger interest and engagement with the project across the whole business.

Making the Most of Champions and Blockers

Resistance to change can be one of the most challenging elements of managing a business and teams. The proposed adoption of a CRM can create fear and apprehension, whether it be about changing roles and responsibilities, job security, being under performance scrutiny, negative outcomes of a poorly executed project and challenges of learning new technology.

Its important management provides a platform and listens to these concerns and demonstrate such fears are unfounded, alleviating skepticism and focusing on the benefits that will help reassure stakeholders. 

• Finding genuine CRM champions early in the project will provide a good foundation for positive thought and action across the wider stakeholder community. 
• Think about the personal benefit CRM will bring to an individuals role and their working day. 

• Identify those who will be the most vocal about their concerns and avoid them fostering negativity within the wider group. Bringing them early into the project, educating on value and the positives, giving them responsibilities to help make it a success and ultimately turning them from blockers to champions will deliver much better results.

Communicating Value

Keeping your company-wide stakeholders informed throughout the whole CRM journey, from evaluation and implementation through to adoption and ongoing mastery, as already discussed is critical to success. Good communication and supportive listening will go a long way in building trust and engagement in the project.

• Develop a communications plan that clearly defines your CRM vision, benefits, strategy, schedule and activity to help alleviate fears and provide confidence in the decision making and positive outcomes of the project. 
• Provide regular updates via your intranet, email, newsletter or meetings with individual managers or as a wider group. 
• Give stakeholders the opportunities to voice their concerns and ideas. This may be through on-line surveys, polls and even competitions, that can bring a fun element into the proceedings.

You can also turn to your vendor for support with this activity as they should be able to supply customer success case studies and value related content that you can communicate and share with your stakeholders.

Breaking Down Departmental Barriers

So often in organizations, departmental teams work in isolation of each other. CRM provides an ideal opportunity to break down these barriers. Establishing a cross-company task group for the CRM project will help encourage wider team engagement and collaboration. 

Involvement and contribution to the design, implementation and adoption of the CRM solution will help foster improved cross departmental interactions and cohesive, consistent working practices across the whole business. 

Again, bringing in a fun element, such as a competition and rewards around CRM use or improvement ideas can help develop camaraderie, positivity and focus on collective sustainable CRM use and value.

CRM Education & Training

Investing in a comprehensive training program is imperative to positive user engagement and use. Including budget for both initial and ongoing education and training programmes within your CRM strategy will alleviate user fears and frustrations and help them get the most from the solution. 

• Consider companywide training with your vendor or develop product experts who take on the responsibilities of training other users. If you have large numbers of staff a model of train the trainer can also work well, where your own staff super users become the trainers of other staff members. 
• Make the most of Vendor comprehensive support resources and easily accessible free training materials such as webinars, videos, user manuals, FAQs, in-product help as well as a user community forum and regular educational communications. 
• Develop a CRM User Handbook, setting out the design, data capture, management and use criteria, agreed workflows and user roles and responsibilities will provide a working document that can be easily referenced by all users and help contribute to delivering an effective and valuable CRM. Consider putting together a day in the life of document for employees that are in a specific role that will use the CRM in the same way each day.

CRM Mastery & Improvement

Its easy to become complacent, once initial CRM implementation has been successful, but sustainable user buy-in and use requires on-going commitment to the above activities. 

• Regularly communicating and promoting CRM related customer experience, productivity and process efficiency wins will demonstrate value and return on investment. 
• Developing in-house CRM expertise and encouraging users to contribute improvement ideas and seeing these implemented will help your teams engage more deeply with the solution and gain further value, both at a personal and business level.

Your vendor relationship and on-going support is also critical at this stage and essential in helping you sustain user buy-in and continued development of your CRM value andcontribution to business growth.

Conclusion

Incorporating a CRM system into your business is an important step towards improving productivity and growth, but it can be a challenging process. By following the tips outlined in this article, including engaging stakeholders, promoting user adoption, and investing in comprehensive training programs, you can increase the odds of successful CRM adoption. With a well-implemented CRM system and sustained user engagement, you can achieve better customer relationships and business growth.

Its widely acknowledged that the costs of attracting new customers is up to five times as much as keeping an existing customer, and with cost per acquisition continuing to rise, this gap may be widening. 

Cost-per-acquisition has increased by 1.33% (December 2018 v December 2019) now standing at 8.01%

IRP, E-commerce Benchmarks, 2019

In todays competitive business world, it is critical to allocate marketing and sales resource and budget wisely, your customer acquisition strategies and tactics need to be cost effective and deliver the growth results you need. 

In this blog, we examine the key marketing and sales activities needed to deliver effective customer acquisition, starting with initial interaction through to qualifying leads and winning opportunities. We will discuss how Customer Relationship Management (CRM) can support the customer buying journey, smarter working, informed decision making and improved performance. 

Step 1: Idealized Identification

The first step to developing effective customer acquisition strategies is to target the right audience, through the appropriate channels, with the right messages, campaigns and content. 

Some key information and data that your business needs to be capturing and analyzing to target your desired prospect and customer, includes: 

• Company/Contact Demographics 
• Key Drivers & Challenges 
• Job Roles/Function 

• Social Media Activity 
• Lead Source 
• Engagement Channels 
• Content Downloads / Topics of Interest 
• Conversion Routes and Time 

• Sales Won/Lost/Customer Lifetime Value 

This data will give you valuable insight in the development of customer personas or avatars, which then help define your key messages, content and target channels, ultimately delivering more effective campaigns to increase engagement and lead generation. 

Many businesses are still struggling to successfully capture, store and use this data in any meaningful way, surprisingly still using spreadsheets, email and paper methods to do so. 

Adopting CRM gives you access to a single source database with customizable fields to capture the information your business sees as critical to understanding your customer, as well as providing search, export and analysis functionality. 

Step 2: Marketing Magic

Next, we turn to the marketing strategies your business will use to attract new customers. Analysis of your past activities and results will help you identify the most effective tactics previously undertaken. This intelligence together with your personas will provide a well- informed foundation for defining your new segmentation and targeting strategies, marketing tactics and resource allocation. 

Analyzing your whole customer acquisition journey and calculating conversion rates at each stage gives you tangible numbers for both your marketing and sales targets. 

CRM is an essential marketing tool for customer acquisition and can act as your one-stop marketing solution or be integrated with other marketing tools such as email automation and website Content Management System for automated data management across platforms. 

Data can be easily searched, filtered, sorted, analyzed and shown in Dashboards within your CRM, as well as exported to Spreadsheets for more in-depth analysis. Key customer acquisition marketing activities that can be managed in CRM include: 

Activity Tracking: Your marketing activities and subsequent interactions by potential prospects can be recorded against each contact record, such as a sent email, a website form fill, a content download, a webinar, workshop or other event attended. This ensures all teams have a full history of the engagement with your prospects, vital information, certainly for your sales team who are busy converting your prospect to customers. 

Campaign Management: With customers increasingly expecting personalized service across the board, sending generic email campaigns to your whole contact database is no longer effective. 

Within CRM, you can easily segment and generate your more targeted contact lists, create and re-use email templates and automate and schedule one off emails or multi-phase campaigns, these are then automatically recorded against each contact and easily tracked for follow up and further action. 

Marketers who use segmented campaigns note as much as a 760% increase in revenue.

Campaign Monitor, 2019

Lead Nurture: With prospects engaging with your touchpoints on average 8 to 12 times before engaging with your sales process, lead nurture is a crucial responsibility of marketing. The better the experience and the more value, these interactions deliver to your prospects, the more ready they will be to engage with your Sales Team and the easier it will be to convert them to customers. Lead nurture activities can be captured, assessed and analyzed within your CRM, giving powerful insight into your most effective lead conversion campaigns and future activity development. 

Content Management: With content creation a key element of marketing budgets, it is vital to use these valuable resources as much as possible. However, as creation, publication and promotion are usually the remit of the marketing team, content may not be readily known or made available to other parts of the business. 

45% of marketers saying that at least 50% of their campaigns are content-led

World Media Group, The Future of Global Content-Led Marketing, 2019 

Storing vital content assets within your CRM library will make them accessible to other teams. Certainly, your Sales Team will benefit from being able to access and provide resources such as Case Studies, Blogs, eBooks etc to prospects adding value and building supportive relationships. 

Performance Monitoring & ROI Assessment: It is vital to monitor the performance of your marketing campaigns and assess results to deliver campaign improvements and determine Return on Investment. Being able to customize and set up key performance indicators within your CRM will give you an up-to-date, accurate picture of your customer acquisition, decision making becomes much easier and changes to strategies more agile. 

Step 3: Quantifiable Qualification

The next stage of customer acquisition is the remit of your Sales Team, responsible for qualifying and converting your marketing leads to paying customers. With advanced technology and the internet leading to prospects being much better informed before engaging with your sales process, closing the deal becomes more challenging. 

Having an informed understanding of your prospects needs and interactions with your business, will help your sales team to deliver more informed and consultative discussions, create added value, build trust and deeper relationships, critical to achieving successful sales conversions. 

CRM provides the ideal solution for delivery of these ideals and assist with your customer acquisition sales activities including: 

Sales Process Management: Providing your sales team with a defined sales processes will help manage accountability to deliver a consistent, unified, focused approach to increase new customer sales. 

B2B companies that defined a formal sales process experienced 18% more revenue growth compared to companies that didnt.

Vantage Point Performance and the SalesManagement Association Study. 

CRM allows you to embed bespoke sales processes and activities within the solution, giving your Sales Team a powerful tool to be more productive and deliver better results. Your Sales Manager can have up-to-date visibility of activities to support and direct the team, as well be able to easily refine and improve sales processes. 

Lead Management: Your marketing team have worked hard to generate qualified leads for your Sales Team, follow up is crucial to delivering return on investment and conversion to qualified opportunities. Keeping track and updating leads can be challenging and easily overlooked when more urgent sales opportunities are prioritized. 

Using a Lead Management module within CRM can help you stay on top of your leads, with prioritization and allocation to your sales team. Follow up activities such as phone calls and email can then easily be recorded against the lead. 

Access to other data in your CRM, such as lead source, marketing interactions, notes and histories, can all help your Sales Representatives gain an in-depth understanding of prospects and provide more valuable and constructive discussions to qualify and convert leads to genuine sales opportunities. The process can also assist in weeding out any leads that do not fit your offering. 

Sales Opportunity Management: More critical and challenging is converting your qualified opportunities to won sales and securing new customers. This may involve phone calls, meetings, demonstrations, trials and submission of proposals and quotations. 

Step 4: Pipeline Perfection

Performance Monitoring and Forecasting: Having an up-to-date accurate sales pipeline is essential to running a successful sales team, track opportunity progress, identify roadblocks and undertake sales forecasting. 

CRM can display in graphical format (Dashboards) and reports, your sales performance indicators, pipeline and essential sales forecasting, giving you instant access to key information and data.

Further analysis can be undertaken of captured marketing and sales data to establish conversion rates across your buyer journey from lead source, to qualified lead, to sales opportunity to won sale. This can help better inform your customer acquisition strategies and improvement plans to secure and get even more customers.

Closing Thoughts

implementing an effective customer acquisition strategy requires a targeted approach that leverages marketing and sales activities to create a seamless customer journey. By adopting a CRM system, you can centralize your customer data, segment and target your audience, and manage your marketing and sales activities in one place.

With a unified view of your customer acquisition journey, you can optimize your campaigns, improve lead conversion, and grow your business. By following the steps outlined in this blog, you can take the necessary steps to attract and retain valuable customers and drive sustainable growth for your business.