It can often be said that smaller businesses can have the upper hand in certain ways – adaptability, a potential fast growth line and the ability to provide personalised offerings that customers want but let’s not forget the significant elephant in the room here.
Trying to achieve this on a lower budget can seem like you are fighting an uphill battle and some tools that could help you on your journey are often added to your wish list rather than in your armoury. Having said that, if you had to look to put a tool at the top of your list, it should be a CRM system.
If you are a small or medium sized business that wants to prepare for rapid growth, bringing in technology that will improve efficiency is absolutely essential. CRM technology is the key ingredient in helping you to prepare for rapid growth, as it can help you to boost efficiency and effectiveness as well as help to increase sales.
So, why are we so adamant that a CRM system has to be implemented in your business to achieve sales and growth? Let’s take a look further at this!
Take the shackles off your sales team
Let’s take a moment to reflect, no-one likes doing paperwork. Your sales team don’t want to waste their time on countless spreadsheets; they need to sell, connect and deliver for the business. A CRM can help take the shackles off them by giving them a centralised location for all sales management and customer engagements.
So, no more sales admin, your team can feel empowered, motivated and equipped to succeed. Therefore, it is a win-win situation for them. However, let's go down the rabbit warren a little more.
Your sales team will be able to set up reminders for follow-up calls, schedule meetings and plan out customer engagement strategies inside the sales CRM. Ensure that you save valuable time by not having to make your way through endless spreadsheets or sticky notes. Let’s not beat around the bush here, you will save significant amounts of time which will allow you to improve customer relationships and work towards bringing in more leads for the business.
It’s not just all about the selling; it’s the way in which you do it too
When looking to scale up sales, the last thing you want to encounter is chaos. A CRM can help bring some form of structure to this madness. Put together a dashboard that enables you to follow leads, manage your pipeline and identify which prospects are hot or not.
It’s like having a mentor who is encouraging you to keep going through a strategic approach, enabling them to achieve the very best.
Added to which, many sales CRM such as Dynamics CRM come fully equipped with AI functionality that can help your sales team to prioritise leads. By reviewing every single touchpoint, your sales team are able to gain valuable insights into which leads are more likely to close. This carefully planned, personalised approach helps to guarantee that your sales team’s efforts are rewarded with better results. Better results mean more money and less stress.
Utilise the true power of data-driven insights
It goes without saying but intuition has its place. However, why do you feel the need to rely on your gut when you have endless data at your fingertips? Through the use of a sales CRM, you can find out more insights into customer behaviour, their preferences, trends, patterns and much, much more.
Here is a way of looking at it, think you are looking into the future with a system that is smarter than you are. Let’s make this a little more transparent.
Through the use of sales CRM analytics, you are able to divide your customers based on certain metrics such as purchasing history, location or even the way they engage with your content from your marketing campaigns. Personalising your marketing campaigns based specifically on these segments means that you aren’t trying to break through an unbreakable door but instead are having more meaningful interactions. Therefore, data-driven decisions are able to rapidly improve your ROI meaning that every single pound in marketing counts.
Revolutionise the way that leads are allocated
Given the way in which businesses operate nowadays, leads can come from almost any channel – paid advertising, direct enquiries and many other ways. However, it is vital that you react quickly before these leads go sour or move to your competitors. You will find that this is where your CRM’s lead allocation and scoring tools can change the way you work.
They are able to drive leads to the right member of your sales team based on a certain criteria, that can be anything from location right through to interest in certain products. It’s like there to help ensure that everything runs as smoothly as it can. For those that don’t see these sorts of things in black and white, lead scoring is the process of assigning a score to each lead, taking into account diverse factors such as demographics, behaviour as well as engagement.
The whole purpose of lead scoring is to highlight the leads that have the greatest chance of converting into customers and prioritising these for follow-up by the sales team.
On the other hand, opportunity scoring is similar in the fact that it usually consists of giving scores to all opportunities, considering the probability of closing them. As with lead scoring, opportunity scoring makes use of certain elements such as the size of the opportunity, the sales cycle and how far down the sales process the opportunity is.
You will find that lead and opportunity scoring can be done at the same time to allow your sales team to start priortising their efforts and only spending their time on the best leads and opportunities. In addition to this, as the leads go through the sales process and become opportunities, the opportunity score will be updated using the above factors. Following on from this, your sales team will be able to have a bird's eye view of which opportunities have the highest chance of closing and putting all their efforts into those where appropriate. Do you think it ends here? No, it doesn’t!
Take this a step further, more advanced sales CRM tools are able to help you implement ‘round robin’ lead distribution or the ability to distribute leads based on the highest historical conversion rates. Put simply, CRMs are able to distribute leads among the sales team or channel them to the best performing members of your team. As well as this, CRM systems are able to send out follow up emails or messages, taking the initiative when interest from a potential customer is at its highest.
Quicken up the overall sales journey from lead to customer
Creating and maintaining customer relationships doesn’t happen at the drop of a hat, however a sales CRM can help to speed up this process. Through the use of automation to complete admin tasks, your CRM helps to free up your sales team to build those all-important relationships with customers.
Being able to stand out through a personalised chat helps to guarantee that leads get the necessary attention from your sales team.
Better still, you could also look to integrate your CRM with other tools such as marketing automation solutions and much, much more. This will help you to centralise data as well as the ability to deliver a seamless, omnichannel customer experience. From this point, your sales team will be able to engage leads at different touchpoints by making it easy for potential customers to find your product or service.
Keep up to date with what is going in your sales team
Have you ever considered how well you are doing when it comes to sales? A CRM helps to reveal all of this information. It allows you to keep track of your sales pipeline, plot future trends/patterns as well as provide you with the opportunity to make changes to your overall sales strategy.
Not hitting your targets?
It can certainly be easier to correct things if you have real-time data at your fingertips.
Furthermore, your CRM can also be connected to your inventory system if required, providing you with live updates on stock levels. Imagine having the ability to know exactly when to process a restock order or which products should be pushed in your next marketing campaign. This transparent view helps to avoid guessing as well as to build a much more responsive sales strategy.
Next Steps?
Let’s face it, for SMEs and other businesses, a CRM isn’t a nice to have, it has to be a must-have. However, let’s just state exactly why partnering with a dedicated and reliable Dynamics 365/CRM partner is the best move.
It is important to understand that a CRM implementation can involve a number of complex processes such as migrating data, providing CRM training for users as well as system integration and change management. You will find that an experienced CRM partner like Advantage can help guide you through these processes, making it much easier for you to make the journey and help to reduce the risks around doing so.
So, why not take the next step by giving Advantage a call today?
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