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In the past decade and going forward the best way for any company to stand out is with a brilliant B2B marketing strategy. That’s not to say that customer service, sales and leadership aren’t important. But with increasing global competition and the need to efficiently market a company’s brand, image, products, or services, more and more B2B organisations have started implementing marketing automation software.
These tools are designed to provide your business with the most suitable methods for defining your prospects, attract your customers, capture important information on leads, and map unique flows through the customer journey.
2021 The Year of the Customer
2021 is shaping up to be the year of the customer and with businesses unable to meet up face-to-face, a company’s digital image is the main and currently only side your customer and leads get to interact with. In 2019 studies showed that between 70-80% of people research a company online BEFORE visiting the small business or making a purchase with them. That’s in 2019, so what do you think people are doing now?
Why adopt a CRM system?
B2B marketers adopt CRM systems for different reasons. A powerful CRM can empower your contact management, be it leads, prospects, opportunities, or closed sales. A well-implemented CRM is also capable of creating a single view of the customer and acting as a central database for all your customer information. Organizing your data and getting rid of data silos is one of the biggest reasons why B2B organisations benefit from CRM.
Thanks to most CRM systems now being in the cloud, any one of your users can access the data regardless of where they are. In April 2020, almost 50% of the UK’s workforce were working from home.
Who benefits from CRM?
It isn’t just the marketing team that will benefit from a CRM system, the solution is useful for the sales team, support team, HR, and directors. Everyone, at some point, will need to access the data for the clients/leads that they are dealing with. Directors will need a bird’s eye view of all the sales, lead generation and customer service reports. Your sales team will need to know if invoices have gone out, what the last communication with a client was and so on. Your support team will want to know which clients have open cases, where the support team is in dealing with them and how much time is being spent on each case.
Professional CRM makes it easy to keep track of all the data you have and ensure you regularly check and update any information when needed. The saying goes, a CRM system is only as good as the data in it. CRM ensures your data is always up to date. With its help, you will not only increase the leads you generate but also significantly improve their quality.
CRM system also comes in handy when there is a need to measure your marketing ROI. You can use the software to track the first touch a lead had with your organization. For example, if your SEO or PPC campaigns generated a lead, that later became a customer, marketing can take credit for influencing this deal.
The world of B2B is becoming more complex, and a good CRM is the secret to making it easier.
If you want to find out more about CRM and how it can help your business, Collier Pickard is here for you. We have over 25 years of experience in the CRM world, working in a variety of sectors with a variety of businesses. Head over to our website to find out more.
