A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an important tool for any small, medium, or large company. When used well, a CRM is a fundamental pillar that can ensure that your strategy is achieving its intended objectives.
However, a CRM is not something you purchase and have some sort of guarantee of automatic success. In that case, we would all be entrepreneurs. You have to know how to get the best out of your CRM, and understand what makes it move, work and tick in the best way. It’s easy to point fingers when things go sideways, but it’s certainly not the CRM’s fault!
The bottom line here is to understand what a CRM is, what a CRM does, and how a CRM can be used to improve your business. That said, let’s do it!
What is a CRM?
A CRM is a tool that uses all resources more efficiently and improves the general operations of your business, managing the relationship with your customers with workflows providing analytical data.
How does it make it? A CRM receives and compiles as much data as possible from users who interact with your brand and/or product. An effective CRM can gather data from multiple channels, such as your website, email marketing campaigns, social networks, and search engines, making it easier to interpret and understand.
What does a CRM do?
There are several ways to use a CRM, but at the end of the day, it will always depend on what your company can or wants to achieve.
- Customer management
- Lead management
- Measure results
- Gather data from multiple sources
- Invoicing
- and more…
These are some of the services you can find in various CRMs. It is always up to the user to know how to get the best out of it and also to choose the CRM that best suits the business.
What a CRM can’t do?
Never forget that a CRM is a tool and only a tool.
It’s software that helps you achieve your goals, but it doesn’t create a strategy for you. It is up to the user to understand the market and classify the audience, and once these segments are created, the CRM will manage them accordingly.
Common mistakes when using a CRM
Ignore the Analytical aspect
A CRM can analyze the trends and behavior of your users. When there are peaks, either decreasing or increasing, you have to investigate what happened that day/week. If there is a product that is being viewed more, we have to be more aggressive in advertising. Your CRM will show all this, but it is up to the user to have a critical mind and be able to interpret the analysis.
Understanding the coordination of your marketing campaigns with website traffic is something that should be seen often, and a good dashboard will show you that instantly and in real-time.
The bottom line here is that if you’re not learning from your own data, your business growth will be limited.
Fast, one-stop integrations
Nowadays, it is imperative to have all the information in one place – If you understand the monster that is digital marketing, you realize that there are far too many platforms to advertise and interpret data. Meta Ads, TikTok Ads, and Google Ads, among others that exist and are yet to exist. There are too many and too much time is wasted traveling from one platform to another and correlating the data!
Your CRM is obliged to show you all this as soon as you log in. This feature alone is already saving you a lot of time!
It’s everyone’s responsibility
The responsibility of a CRM is not on the IT guys or any other department.
At its core, it is a business solution that uses technology to deliver benefits to the entire organization. Everyone is a stakeholder in the success of CRM because everyone benefits, not just those responsible for its implementation.
On the other hand, each group must have information about how the system is configured to ensure that it reflects their day-to-day reality. Collaboration by everyone in the CRM lifecycle is essential to reaping the fullest possible benefits.
10 Benefits of using a CRM
- All information in just one place
CRMs allow your entire organization to keep all information about potential customers or customers (for any period of time) in a database, accessible to everyone. In this way, it provides quick access for all teams, as well as the ability to easily manage this information through a shared location.
- Increase in customer retention rates
CRMs allow your teams to easily track all customers, standardizing information, processes, and communication for lasting customer satisfaction.
- Automation and information collection
With a CRM, you’ll never waste time recording emails, or calls, or meetings again — all this information is automatically collected in the system and recorded.
- Smart, data-driven decisions
Any business needs sales, organization and a good strategy. Through automatic reports, it is easier when you have the most important KPIs at hand.
- Automate what’s boring
There are things that are better left to computers and their automatism. 24/7 data collection and automatic operations where you only need to define the first time.
- Make more money
With a CRM helping with organization, strategy and communication, sales start to rise, and as they say: more sales; more money!
- Reports
Gone are the days when time was wasted making individual reports for each client. With a click of a button, the customer has access to his report, where the KPIs can be easily changed to suit the business.
- Ensure communication
Good communication is essential to maintain the brand image before potential customers.
- Keeping the same software as your business grows
As your business grows, your CRM grows with you — over time there is more information, there are more customers, there is more data, there are more employees, and your CRM will deal with it all!
- Internal and administrative management
Running a business is complicated. You have to allocate your time to fundamental things, and you can’t waste too much time managing teams.
When you use a CRM, you end up increasing the productivity of your company and your employees. You have information about your customers at your fingertips and in one place for everyone to consult.
Are you dating CRMs? Why not try Octoki? It has everything that has been said here and maybe more. Come on!