What is a CRM system?
A Customer Relationship Management tool known by its short-form CRM is an online software system that forms a bridge between your company and its customers.
It helps the marketing, sales, and customer service departments of any organization to:
- create planned and measurable marketing strategies
- enable lead scoring and nurturing
- track all the relevant customer details information into a unified system
This system is nothing but an online CRM software. In simple words, it is an umbrella term to manage all your customer-front operations by aligning various departmental activities into a single sales CRM software.
CRM is being Adopted Worldwide
Almost all companies are adopting sales CRM software for their marketing, sales, and customer service operations. It is anticipated that the online CRM software market is going to cash out more than half a billion dollars in 2025. Users can easily access data without being bound by time or place through the mobile CRM.
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Social CRM
Social CRM helps integrate your company’s social media channels into an online CRM software to help marketing and salespeople understand the behavior, interests, and activities of their potential target audience to create the most compelling content through different mediums to attract them.
Here’s what your Online CRM Software will do for You
1. Build a Centralized Database
Business Development Managers are expected to have tons of contacts since they are heavily into networking. As a BDM, you would be doing cold calling, curating potentials from various business directories, local conferences, business meet-ups and referrals, and networking summits.
Even if it is hanging at the coffee shop or happening to bump into someone while strolling around, BDMs or C-level executives always try to find the potential in the meeting with someone by connecting the dots that lead to your product/ service marketing or a sale. Sales CRM software collaborates contacts generated from different sources into a consolidated system to access them anytime from anywhere without any hurdle.
2. Create Data Segmentation
Based on varied business requirements, brand positioning, sales targets, and numerous other factors, your prospects fall into different categories that need special attention and nurturing at every stage to close the deal. Also, you might be dealing with various vendors and need to streamline the communication or sales strategy.
An online CRM software will help you with data segmentation based on customer priority. For the sales team, CRM software will also help micro-segregate customers into A, B, and C types for even more personalized targeting. It also tells you about the lead won, lost, or converted into an opportunity.
3. Automate Manual Processes and Reporting
One of the most attractive features of sales CRM software is its capability to automate regular reporting tasks. Unlike old times for salespeople, which were governed by spreadsheets when it came to sending weekly/ monthly reports to their managers, an online CRM software emails the automated sales report to managers. Also, for marketing teams, who usually clone their campaigns, repetitive steps are stored automatically to access later when required.
4. Remove Data Duplicity
Usually, SMEs and enterprise-level organizations have multiple employees within a single team. One such example is a ‘sales team’. Usually, multiple sales representatives can reach out to either one particular source or prospect while creating a database.
Also, it is practically impossible for each one to coordinate with each other daily. This leads to creating the same opportunity by multiple people. However, sales CRM software logs only the unique opportunities and deletes the duplicate ones. This saves time and effort resulting in increased productivity.
5. Improve Lead Scoring
An online CRM software helps salespeople assign a particular score to the leads to keep them warm. This helps in attending to these leads at the later relevant stage. After a certain cooling period, sales representatives can nurture these leads to push further into the sales funnel through eBooks, podcasts, webinars, newsletters, discounts, etc. This will help in building a healthy sales pipeline that can be nurtured at every stage and finally closed over some time.
Take Away
More than 80% of the consumers will enquire about your product/ service online before making the purchase and hence, it is important to satisfy your existing customers and delight the ones you are planning to onboard. 90% of companies that have employed more than 11 people are nowadays using CRM.
An online CRM software acts as a SPOC for an organization’s marketing and sales activities along with customer service management. Sales CRM software has features like a consolidated database, customer interaction history, process automation, and unique data delivery that have helped businesses focus on increasing revenues more than binge into manual operations.
