“The impact on an organization can at times be subtle and distributed throughout the enterprise…Cost savings and productivity enhancements can be seen in saving a salesperson 20 minutes per week in writing activity reports, or answering four times the volume of web-based service requests in the same amount of time.”
–Mary Wardley, vice-president of IDC’s CRM applications research.
CRM has proven over the years, right from its inception, how it can alter businesses for good.
Customer Relationship Management abbreviated as CRM is a technology used for handling the company’s relationships with the customers. The primary motive of the CRM is to improve customer relations, simplify processes, and enhance profit margins.
Apart from these benefits, the use of a CRM tool also helps in supervising Sales Management of the Organization and increasing it to many folds.
Now, let’s take a brief look at the multiple ways in which CRM helps in increasing productivity in sales.
As per my research and years of experiences in developing, handling, and using CRMs, I have listed out 6 major ways a CRM helps in productivity growth:
1). Developing a Long-Lasting Relationship with Customers
2). Offering a Huge Database to Store Data
3). Creating a Great Work Environment
4). Treating Customers Requests on Priority
5). Saving Time on Mundane Tasks
6). Reporting Made Easy
All the above ways ultimately help an organization to skyrocket their efficiency and productivity. I will elaborate on these points, so give you a detailed idea of how a CRM helps.
Developing a Long-Lasting Relationship with Customers
As per a report by Trackvia, CRM is known to improve customer retention, by as much as 27%.
CRM as the name suggests was developed with the sole intention of building and retaining customer relations.
How exactly does CRM help in building loyalty with your customers?
CRM aids you in ‘ Customer Acquisition’ as well as ‘Customer Retention’. It will provide you with the tools to help you manage the activities around customer engagement to improve the customer experience.
For example, we have a ‘Customer Engagement Score’ in edge CRM. What it exactly does is scores our every customer on his engagement with us, give a detailed report of how and when we started the relation, and provides timely reminders regarding our due interactions. All this in graphical representation for easy understanding.
I can track the customer engagement ranking right from contact addition to proposal offering throughout the sales cycle with every interaction recorded for my reference.
It becomes extremely easy for our salespeople to create engagement with a particular customer by contacting him depending on the priority and urgency of the requirement.
And if you are able to satisfy your customers by providing them accurate and timely solutions, he would become a happy customer. Won’t he? And that’s the start of a deep-rooted and reliable acquaintance.
Similarly, customer retention is possible by studying the buying patterns, product usage, and history of customer service inquiries. Frequent follow-up emails and quick complaint resolution becomes extremely simple with a CRM.
Offering a Huge Database to Store Data
“How you gather, manage, and use information will determine whether you win or lose.”
-Bill Gates
If the technology giant says so, I take his word as truth.
Sales executives from different locations worldwide share a lot of business-critical information with each other and sometimes with customers.
The CRM tools come up with databases which allow storing huge amount of data that can easily be accessed whenever required without any hassle.
Also, most CRM nowadays provide a cloud-based solution for data storing.
When I asked my salespeople, what is the most useful feature of CRM, 80% of them voted for quick access to their data through the mobile-based application of CRM.
Planning, creating, and updating tasks is a matter of a few seconds and a few clicks. They are able to update the minutes of meetings when they are on the go.
All this is possible when you have a single centralized data storing system. And a CRM provides you exactly that!
Creating a Great Work Environment
Source: meme.xyz
Though a CRM cannot provide you a furry friend to cheer you up right away, it can definitely ease up the work pressure.
Marketing and Sales teams staff are the people who play a big role in generating revenues for the company. And so they are the ones with maximum workload and deadlines.
The use of CRM tools minimizes the workload on the team by using automated processes which further increases productivity and maximizes the benefit.
We at edge CRM, have a unique way of creating a happy and zealous work environment in our organization. We have gamified our sales process! edge CRM has an intra-team funky leaderboard which gives clear visibility of performances.
We give peculiar accolades to deserving team members. Appreciation of star performers and sharing their traits has created a healthy competition in our teams.
And when your team is motivated, their productivity skyrockets!
Treating Customers Requests on Priority
Remember, the customer’s perception is your reality.
What they think of you and your product is all that matters. So their satisfaction should be your highest priority!
As I stated before, to retain a customer, it is important to get back to his requests as soon as possible. And a CRM System offers a great interface for treating customer requests.
Notifications alert are automatically enabled when customers raise tickets related to their issues.
By using a CRM tool new tasks can be added to the request, already completed tasks can be updated. Also, the priority tickets automatically rise on the top of the queue.
Auto escalations ensure no issue is missed. And when your salespeople are reminded on a frequent basis for priority tasks, it becomes easy for them to close the issue well before the deadline.
And of course, punctual task completion equals high productivity!
Saving Time on Mundane Tasks
Study says use of CRM reduces proposal creation time by around 80%. Now, that’s a huge number!
CRMs offer ready to use templates of almost all documents. It helps in the creation of proposals, proforma invoices, bills, and more in customized template designs.
CRM System takes care of all the repetitive admin tasks and other activities which saves a lot of time for Sales Executives which they can use in doing other productive work.
Not only that, but automation also reduces the chances of human error.
A few months before, we carried out a study of how edge CRM is being practical and efficient in fulfilling our customer needs. We were glad to find out that customers reported that they experienced 40% faster response time (to prospects and clients)!
CRM tools consist of priority email responding and live chat features. It gives a prompt response to the existing and new customers.
Furthermore, easy-to-use adaptable email templates fast track your response cycle.
Adopting CRM solution frees up employee’s time that was earlier used in the manual intervention. Rather they can spend that time in dealing with customers and addressing their queries.
When your salespeople are spending less time creating proposals and drafting emails, they will be more focused on generating leads and closing deals.
Reporting Made Easy
Through all my experience in sales, the thing that I hated most was report generation. It irked me to create, state, and analyze reports.
What about you?
CRM is a lifesaver when it comes to relieving us of this time consuming and tiresome task!
Now I create reports in a breeze.
CRM not only makes data storage easy but also generates sales reports for presenting the data within the organization and make new strategies.
Be it sales reports, forecast reports, or employee performance assessment reports, CRM’s have simplified the complete procedure. You can showcase the vital statistics of your business through automatically generated comprehensive reports available in the form of graphs, charts, and many more visual statistics patterns.
Accurate assessment and clear representation of facts assist in taking realistic and calculated decisions.
Final thoughts
The right CRM plays a crucial role in all Business to Customer based Organizations.
To sum it up, CRM tool helps to build new customer relationships, maintain the relationship with old customers, store huge chunks of sales data, generate and compare sales reports of previous years and designing new strategies for business and sales.
I would confidently state that the right kind of CRM determines the future of a business organization.
What do you think?
How has CRM helped your business?
Share your perception with me. I would appreciate it!
Also, your feedback on this article is important. So, let me know
