Sales CRM is being used abundantly by many businesses today as a means of finding new sales techniques. As evident from the name—Customer Relationship Management—the software is mainly used to keep a track of the personal information of customers, their purchase history, preferences, order progress, and a lot of other information regarding product purchase.
Combined with these features, the CRM also has provisions for incorporation of the marketing tactics. All of this has only one result— an improvement of your organization’s customer service and a reduction of the hassles for your customers.
It is evident from the survey conducted by the Harvard Business Review, which says that if you want to increase your customer loyalty, all you’d have to do is reduce the customer effort.[1]
Given the experience of your sales team, you are to provide certain opportunities for your customers so that they can be guided through the sale process with ease.
A sales CRM is just that tool that can help you reduce customer effort.
How?
According to market statistics, generally, 83% of all the online shoppers need some kind of support to complete their online purchase.[2]
In this regard, the technology of the CRM allows your sales representatives to provide ample help to your customers. This is how it reduces customer effort.
Owing to the benefits stated above, 81% of effective sales organizations are heavily relying on the use of CRM for their day-to-day sales. [3]
They are finding it experiencing great increments in their sales.
However, these organizations apart, the fact also remains that there are certain SMBs like yours that are finding it hard to use it in order to get the same set of benefits.
It is not the fault of a sales CRM system, but of the way those particular businesses are using them. And this is why we have curated 6 of the best practices that can help you achieve maximum ROI.
How can you improve your ROI through CRM?
If your sales techniques are failing despite the fact that you are using a CRM, then, you shouldn’t lose hope at all as there are certain tactics that can help you break the jinx and increase your overall ROI.
So, without any further ado, let’s get down to them.
1. If you’re looking to update your CRM, first compare your options
If you think your CRM is not paying off as it should, or if you haven’t any CRM onboard at all, the best practice to choose the right software for your organization is by putting all the options into the comparison table. The main things that you are to look for should depend on the need of your organization. For example, do your business need the software to be cloud-based or on-site? Do you need to have a CRM that asks for a large upfront cost or is based on service contracts? What features does your business model need?
By asking these questions from yourself and answering them as per the scope your business, we’re sure you’d choose your option without any problem and be happy with it later.
2. Help your sales team to adapt to your CRM
Onboarding is necessary for your sales team to learn the nitty-gritty of the features and the power of the CRM.
If they don’t have a profound knowledge of it, you’d likely lose the 29% sales, 34% sales productivity increase and 43% sales forecast accuracy that is achieved with the help of CRM applications. [4]
In this respect, what you can do is invest in training your employees and providing them ample opportunities to have a hands-on experience. Once they get a hold of everything, the next thing to focus on is testing them. If they pass the tests satisfactorily, you can then leap into the next phase, and that is the complete deployment of your CRM into the day-to-day sales task.
3. Make all software integrations in advance
Design a set of guidelines that can unify all of the sales funnel of your organization. Make it a part of your company policy to encourage everyone to utilize the CRM at its best level. The result of this would indeed be a unified team working on the guidelines you have chalked out to help your business transition well and run smoothly.
However, before laying out definite guidelines, you should integrate and incorporate every necessary application such as email, cloud, phone, or any other application with your CRM in advance. This will help your employees not to delve into any further confusions.
4. Make use of the social media to capture customer data
Customer data is important in analyzing your customer base. However, many organizations do not know where they can get it from. Worse yet, even if they have the data, they don’t have the knowledge to freely organize it or mine in for valuable insights.
Social media is the best option when you are looking for customer data. Majority of your customers would have more than one profiles on different networks, and you can utilize it to your benefit.
Although the best practice is to target every social media platform, LinkedIn is a powerful source if you’re looking for B2B customer data.
Almost 50% of B2B buyers use this platform to make their purchasing decision. [5]
When you are done with capturing useful customer data, the next step to follow is segmenting them into specific categories as each customer is different than the other. Some are more paying while others are not. The segmented categories to sort out your customers should include profitability, industry, geographic location, preferences, or any other category that could help you target each customer base according to their needs.
5. Prepare definite communication scripts
There’s a difference between improvisations and the firefighter approach of a business. The former can help you grow, but the latter can be detrimental to the overall health of your sales. Therefore, the best practice in forging strong customer relations is to prepare communications script. That would help you have a profound and engaging communication protocol when you are communicating with your customers and, in the long run, it would translate into higher ROI.
6. Automate certain processes
The purpose of the CRM is to take a certain amount of load from your sales team and take it itself. It does this through automation. There are loads of processes that can be automated on a CRM and in order to reduce time and money wastage on manual operations, you should automate those processes. For example, you can automate certain responses to customers to improve reliability and speedy answering. Or you can automate how they go through the order processing and finding what they need based on their preferences. Aside from reducing time and money wastage, automation also frees your sales team and reduces any chances of errors.
Summary
Sales CRM contains a set of best sales techniques that can help any business reach the top tier of ROI without straining its resources and manpower much. While many organizations are already reaping the fruits of it, if you think you need an extra edge or improve your current profitability by finding better clients, you can follow the above-mentioned CRM best practices. They are all easy to implement and they beg very little efforts. Therefore, by following them you are not only exempted from major hassles but also given the opportunity to scale your sales to the maximum level possible.
