Customer Relationship Management, otherwise known as CRM, is important – don’t get us wrong. It’s essential that your sales and marketing teams can use CRM to see where each contact and account is in the pipeline in order to work together effectively. But relying on CRM alone won’t be enough.
What a lot of people misunderstand is what CRM actually does. Whilst its name suggests that it does the lead nurturing job for you, it’s not that advanced. CRM is more about showing you your customer relationships, where they are in their buyer journey, and where they are in your lead generation pipeline. It’s actually your sales and marketing team that need to get the relationships built up.
How do you do this? By integrating your marketing processes, from lead generation to email marketing. With strong lead nurturing built up by your marketing, you can use CRM to really get the conversions going.
CRM can help you make campaigns more specific
Knowing all this about clients and contacts can make business so much easier for you in so many ways. First of all, you can market products towards customers who want exactly what you’re offering. This means that deals can be closed a lot faster because it works a lot like the whole “There’s an app for that” trend. Do you want this? We’ve got it right here! For more ideas, look at our 5 marketing automation workflows that can be triggered from CRM.
It improves your sales & marketing teams relationship
With one place to see both sales activities and marketing campaigns that a contact has interacted with, your sales and marketing team can work together to provide a more fluid buyer journey. Say sales can’t get through to a prospect. They can mark an activity in CRM that triggers the contact to go through a marketing campaign designed just for them. Then sales can return to the lead when they’ve shown buying interest. It’s smarketing at its finest.
Customer upsell opportunities get a lot easier too
If you frequent our blog, you probably already know how important the customer is. With your customer relationship management system recording everything, you should know everything you need to about your customers’ buyer journey. With a database of customer profiles, you can know what customers need next and how to get it to them.
The important thing to remember is that CRM is the “how to” rather than the actual legwork itself. Although it can help you to pitch to and handle customers, it won’t go into battle with you. Instead, integrating CRM with your marketing and lead generation tools will improve your relationship management, rather than just record it.