You’ve ended up at this blog because you want help with CRM, throughout this article I’ll be covering the basics, everything that you need to know to get up to speed with what a CRM system is and how it can help your business.
So, let’s get started.
What is a CRM system?
Everyone will have some level of experience using CRM features, from the contacts section of your phone to the address book in Outlook or Gmail. Contact information is hard enough to remember when it’s just your friends and family, for a business it would be impossible for everyone to remember phone numbers, addresses, emails and every contact at a client or lead.
When it comes to business contacts your address book isn’t enough. In addition to names, phone numbers, and addresses, you need to track the products or services people are interested in, what they purchased from your company, what your company has bought from them and more.
So, what is a CRM?
Firstly, it stands for Customer Relationship Management, it helps your business with everything that you need to Acquire, Retain and Develop your customers.
It is a system and the processes behind it are used for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and leads. This is how you will improve business relationships. A CRM system is there to track all your communications with your customers, manage email campaigns, and much more.
Why CRM?
As I said before, you could use the address book in Outlook, or (and this is painful to type) Excel to manage all your contacts. Now, this is fine if you’re a small company without a budget for tech like this. HOWEVER, these tools haven’t been decided with managing business relationships in mind.
The address book in Outlook is there to hold the most basic contact data and Excel can do some very cool things, but how many spreadsheets will you end up with? One for the contacts, one for accounts information, one for customer service information, one for marketing? That can get very messy, very quickly.
CRM systems are designed to organize your contact info and manage your relationship with current and prospective customers, clients, and other contacts. They have been built with this purpose in mind and they do it much better than Outlook or Excel.
A CRM system will do everything that Outlook’s address book will do and more, thanks to the R in its name: Relationship. They’ll help you find all your contacts who work for the same company and any messages that have been sent about your work with that company, and show you who on your team was in contact with them last so you can get an intro. A CRM will help you get the big picture of your contacts, and help you know exactly what to talk about the next time you meet or email someone.
How can a CRM system help?
In this section, I will list the key benefits of any CRM system, if you’d like to find out how CRM can help your business, feel free to get in touch with us and one of our consultants will talk you through it.
- Maintain a database across your sales organisation
- Track all communications with suppliers, prospects, and clients
- Automate your data entry, from integrations with your website, accounts software, marketing automation and more
- Efficiently organise your contact data
- Easily segment customer data
- Reports on all aspects of your business from time to sell, lifetime of a client, call reports and more
- Easily scale your sales processes over time
What to consider when choosing a CRM?
Most CRMs are built around the same principle foundations, but they can vary in terms of features, user experience, scalability, price, and complexity. Some solutions are built for specific industries and market segments, while others serve all kinds of businesses.
When you are trying to choose between a CRM system you should consider these five factors:
- Your goals
- How will the system support you and your goals for the business?
- Integrations
- Can the system integrate with your Accounts System? Marketing Automation? Email?
- Your budget
- Are you looking at a cloud-based CRM? Do you want on-premise CRM? Do you just want basic features or are you looking for all the bells and whistles? Depending on what you’re looking for, the price of CRM can vary massively.
- Flexibility/scalability
- Regardless of the size of your business, the business landscape is always changing. Your goals might change, your processes might change. Regardless of what these changes are, you will need a system that can scale effectively with your business.
- Reporting/analytics
- Good CRM doesn’t just facilitate your workflows; it also helps you analyse these workflows so you can see where you need to be more efficient.
Where do I go for CRM help?
This is where we come in, with more than 20 years in the CRM industry we’re confident that we can put you and your business on the right track when it comes to CRM. Whether you are looking for consultancy on the right system for you, don’t know where to start, or already have a system and need training or support the team here at Collier Pickard will help you select the perfect Customer Relationship Management system for your organisation.
You can get in touch with us here.
