Although the term CRM refers to Customer Relationship Management, it is undeniable that, nowadays, the role of CRM software goes far beyond mere contact management.
With thevarious capabilitiesthese tools have acquired over the past few years, a CRM can bring several benefits to businesses: greater process efficiency, improved customer service, and increased sales.
In fact, CRM platforms can now help improve lead generation, optimize sales processes, and, ultimately, boost sales and close more deals.
How? Discover below some of the key aspects that make a CRM an important foundation for a company’s sales.
Depending on its capabilities, a CRM is typically a vast and valuable repository of information about a company’s prospects and customers: ranging from contact details such as email and phone number to demographic data like age, geographic location, occupation, etc., as well as behavioral information regarding browsing and interaction with the company’s website, blog, and more.
This set of information is extremely relevant for boosting sales, as it allows you to communicate with customers (and potential customers) based on what you already know about them. At the same time, this knowledge of your contact base also allows you to identify patterns and anticipate potential needs.
For example, if your product or service is limited to a specific geographic location, it makes sense to promote it only to people in that area; if you sell a product to a specific industry, you should focus on communicating it only to prospects in that sector; if you offer a specific service that expires after a certain period, you should reach out to customers whose expiration date is approaching to encourage them to renew; or if a potential customer has viewed a specific product page on your website multiple times, it makes sense to provide them with additional information about that same product.
The good news is that a CRM system, when properly used and maintained, will allow you to carry out any of the actions described above, thereby bringing greater personalization and relevance to your sales process.
Generating new leads is generally the most direct and obvious way to boost sales. Your CRM can track the various form submissions through which your company can capture leads: contact or request-for-quote forms on your website, forms for accessing content or resources on a landing page, event registration forms, forms to request a quote or a demo, among many others.
This visibility into the leads generated, along with tracking other interactions that leads have with your touchpoints (for example, you can set up a notification that is sent to the sales team when a lead clicks on a product or service on your website), provides a wealth of useful information to support your team’s sales pitch.
Various technological advances have made it possible today for the different tools used by companies to operate not in isolation, but in an integrated manner. This is the case with CRM tools, such as HubSpot, which can integrate with a wide variety of technology partners.
From integration with your website—if it’s built on a specific CMS like WordPress or Shopify—to integration with invoicing software, as well as integration with customer service and help desk tools or sales tools for making sales calls…
The possibilities are endless and help streamline and empower sales teams, since centralizing all this customer information (website browsing, sales history, support requests, and much more) reduces research time, increases productivity, and ultimately contributes to business growth.
Depending on the software and how each company structures and adapts it to the reality of its business, in theory any CRM should provide a way to organize leads that clarifies which ones are higher and lower priority.
Since not all leads are at the same stage of the purchasing decision process, it’s important for sales professionals to be able to identify which ones are “hotter” and which ones they should take ownership of from the perspective of a potential sales follow-up.
This can be done using more basic, manual processes, through which sales reps create lists or views of leads that are more or less urgent. Or through smarter, automated processes, such as the lead scoring feature in HubSpot’s CRM: an algorithm that automatically assigns scores to leads that meet the demographic and behavioral criteria defined by the company for a lead to be qualified—and thus prioritized—by the sales team.
The visibility provided by your CRM can help your sales team identify the ideal time to present new opportunities or offers (renewals, upselling, cross-selling, etc.) to existing customers or to proactively engage with customers who may be at risk of churning.
By tracking the entire history of campaigns and sales interactions with customers, you’ll be in a position to provide a better experience and more satisfying customer service, which can foster customer retention and loyalty. A deeper understanding of customer needs leads to a stronger—and, predictably, more enduring—relationship.
Sales work can become highly repetitive and “administrative.” It involves prospecting for customers, sending follow-up emails, setting reminders to reach out, sending documents or information requested by customers, and much more.
Adopting the right technology helps sales teams free themselves from certain manual and recurring procedures—which can be performed automatically—and focus more on their sales efforts and interactions with customers. This is because a CRM allows you to set up automation workflows that can streamline or even eliminate these day-to-day tasks for sales professionals.
What cannot be measured cannot be optimized. This maxim applies not only to marketing activities but also to the sales cycle, which must be constantly monitored in order to be improved. And this can, in fact, be an important role of your CRM.
By monitoring the different aspects of your sales process in your CRM (calls made, emails sent, tasks completed, proposals submitted, proposals awarded, average time to close a deal, etc.), you’ll gain greater visibility into what’s working well and what, on the other hand, can be optimized. This monitoring can be done from a team-wide perspective as well as at the individual level for each sales representative.
Furthermore, the advantage of generating reports and dashboards in a CRM is that they eliminate any need for manual and recurring data entry, since the CRM automatically populates reports in real time.
This ease of generating sales performance reports can undoubtedly help your company make decisions based on concrete data—and, therefore, more strategic ones .
In short, it’s clear how CRM software can boost a company’s sales in various ways.
Can your CRM do everything you just read about? No? Then we’d be happy to advise you on how you can do it with HubSpot, one of the leading CRM tools worldwide. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us!
Content originally published in September 2021.