Customer relationship management (CRM) software is a tool that is used to gather customer interaction, help generate leads, process retention strategies, and automate report generation. For a small business, having multiple teams to cater to different aspects of the business can prove to be financially crippling.
Simple CRM tools help those businesses benefit from the functions that they offer. Here are the top 10 benefits of using simple CRM software.
1. Centralized Data and Performance Metrics
Raw data and performance metrics are essential for businesses. With data, you can predict the market trends and strategize your moves. With metrics, designing campaigns become much more efficient.
But raw heterogeneous data is of no use if you can’t extract, transform, and analyze it. For that, either you can use software for different aspects of the operation, or let CRM platforms do that for you. Although only having CRM software won’t do the trick, you’d need experts to analyze the data, but CRM software can tabulate, collate, and organize data for more efficient collaboration.
In a sales funnel setup, where you generate leads, categorize them, and complete the sales, CRM software helps you to manage them.
Oftentimes, information about the quality of the leads isn’t very detailed when a new prospect fills out a form and shows interest in your product. CRM software, with artificial intelligence, helps you to design the most prudent strategy that you can take to secure the deal.
After a lead becomes your customer, the CRM software tracks their purchase habits and generates reports to understand which demographic they are from and who purchases your products.
2. Data Visualization
Keeping spreadsheets with lead, sales, and administrative data means that you need to manually input and export data to understand what’s important. And without visualizing that data, pitching an idea in a meeting becomes challenging.
Despite having limitations, the benefits of simple CRM software goes beyond data management. It presents the clean data in a way that’s comprehensible to most. From the dashboard, that comes bundled with most CRM software, managing lead generation, customers, and business operations become much easier.
For example, marketing managers mostly are interested in email metrics. A dashboard, showing how many emails were sent, how many people have opened it, and the click-through rate would be most beneficial to them.
But for a business manager, these metrics don’t hold much value. They are interested in revenue generation, return on investment (ROI), and optimizing production. For them, having a CRM dashboard with those metrics is most practical.
Depending on usage, CRM software lets every user have their custom dashboards.
3. Content Automation
As you’ll be continuously capturing data about your customers, market, and industry, it’s important that you create more relevant personalized email outreach campaigns. If your customer base is huge, manually sending emails to each one of them by their position in the funnel isn’t very worthwhile.
If a customer has almost decided to buy from you, it’s futile to send them generic emails informing them about the benefits of having such products. Emailing them what more they can do by having your product is more practical in this case. Your content marketing service agency would help you out in that aspect.
And when your customers have already bought your product or services, it’s also important to push them out of your drip campaign to avoid confusion. CRM software customizes and automates the emails to fit each customer.
4. Proactive Customer Service
In addition to automation, CRM tools help your marketing team to get thorough information about the customers before interacting with them. If your service representative knows what the customer is having an issue with, they can get back to solving the issue instantly without the customer needing to explain it again. Because of that, your customers feel more comfortable keeping in touch with your representatives and hesitate to deviate from your competitors.
5. Dynamic Collaboration
Anyone with authorization can access the data pool available with your CRM software. That results in efficient collaboration and effective customer service. An individual having access to your CRM software can fill out details of the customer while others analyze their purchase behavior. With dynamic collaboration through CRM software, the whole team can work on the latest information efficiently.
6. Increased Sales
CRM software can generate sales reports, streamline the sales process, and automate tasks to help build a better workflow for the sales teams. By having a more effective step-by-step sales process, you can optimize the lead management system to generate more sales and revenue.
7. Increased Return on Investment
An increased sales figure is not viable if the operational costs aren’t minimized. CRM software is generally cheaper than having a dedicated team developing applications for each segment of your operation. Hiring your team of experts to process the data and analyze customer behavior is much more expensive than having a CRM tool do that. They also save a lot by automating and customizing outreach campaigns.
Compared to decentralized approaches, CRM tools generate a higher ROI for most companies.
8. Customer Retention
After you’ve converted your lead, you need to start a whole new set of operations for each of them. As important as it is to have new customers coming, retaining customers is important too. As returning customers are already in the funnel and don’t need to be engaged in the sales process all over again, customer retention demands a huge chunk of internal resources and investment. Your CRM software helps automate the process by keeping them engaged with customized offers and products relating to their previous purchase.
9. Zero Migration Hassle
A scaling business needs to upgrade its servers, sales teams, and production workflow. Which could be a financially challenging event for most companies. Businesses that are already integrated with CRM platforms have the liberty to upgrade their systems without needing to go through the hassle.
10. Efficient Administrative Tasks
As a business leader, you’re responsible for keeping track of every aspect of your operations and giving constructive inputs to your teams. As tough as the job is, without having ample data, it only gets tougher. CRM platforms help you manage the business by generating clean reports about your sales figures, customer retention, predictive analysis, and much more.
The Bottom Line
A simple CRM software can help you run your business more efficiently. Outsourcing lead collection, sales generation, and reporting become much more proficient when using CRM software. From centralized data management to increased ROI, from data visualization to better customer service, CRM tools are revolutionizing business operations and management.
