CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. Generally, it is a set of strategies, tools, techniques, and technologies that enterprises use to develop, retain as well as acquire customers. This tool helps businesses with marketing, sales, and service management.
CRM software, therefore, improves interactions between businesses and customers for increased profits. By focusing on a company’s relationships with suppliers, customers, colleagues among other relations, a professional CRM helps companies to recruit new prospects, win their trust, and offer efficient services and support through the built relationships.
Customer Relationship Management is therefore a tool for all. By setting the pace for better sales management, business development, recruitment and retention, and marketing, crm is the best way for organizations to manage both internal and external relationships especially in 2021.
According to ElasticPath 2020 report, the cost of acquiring new customers is five times that of retaining existing ones. With the actual effects of COVID-19 yet to be documented, CRM is expected to grow by 87% in 2021 compared to a 12% growth in 2020 (Market Research Future, 2020).
How Does It Work?
Artificial Intelligence
Customer Relationship Management tools are exclusively driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI). They, therefore, make it seamless to automate tasks such as data collection, marketing campaigns, email marketing among other key business processes. There is therefore more time for sales reps to engage in active selling as opposed to doing repetitive manual duties.
Analytics And Metrics
Companies need deeper insights into their sales data for them to perform better. This helps them in better planning, making important predictions into the future, setting the right time to contact leads as well as knowing how best to engage with them. Also, this tool makes it much easier for managers to visualize success rates for their employees in completing tasks or making sales.
Sales Tools
According to Super Office 2021, 65% of sales reps who used CRM managed to reach targeted sales quotas. Besides, the same report says that sales reps had a 26.4% increase in productivity after integrating CRM with mobile and social media. By enhancing business process automation, improving sales and marketing collaboration, leads, and customer messaging CRM easily helps businesses to drive sales.
Why CRM For 2021
2020 has been a year of mixed fortunes businesses. A number of organizations are therefore left gazing with more doubt than hope as they transition into 2021. Businesses, therefore, need a better understanding of the current consumer needs amidst COVID-19, targeting the right audience and making efforts to reach them at the right time, and investing in the most appropriate technologies.
For instance, as an entrepreneur, you can still boost your business with CRM in 2021 and emerge strong even with the competition.
Additionally, organizations need to understand new opportunities arising from COVID-19 and acquire the right technologies to explore them towards the new normal.
Why CRM For Business Strategy In 2021?
Customer Satisfaction
CRM helps teams by capturing, storing, and making customer data available to sales reps through an interactive reporting dashboard. With all the information about clients such as name, contact, preferences, previous purchases and interactions, career, where they stay among other personal information, teams are able to send more personalized communications through emails and other messaging services. In fact, at 94%, contact management is the most requested CRM feature in 2021.
Knowing your customers in an era where more virtual engagement is the order of businesses as more and more consumers shop online is the best way to improve satisfaction and customer experience with your business. Besides, CRM automates routine processes and provides managers with tools that make repeated processes effortless and customer-oriented for enhanced satisfaction.
Segmentation
With the pandemic in place, businesses want to target prospects with the highest conversion potential in order to have better ROI with the limited resources. A good CRM is suitable for businesses of any size and should be able to help organizations segment contact data and be able to run targeted campaigns during and after the pandemic.
Segmentation, therefore, helps businesses in 2021 by making it easier for sales teams to understand who is interested, who is undecided, and who is completely not interested. With this information, the sales process takes a shorter time and the organization gets an expanded bottom line in return.
Customer Retention
Every organization is building a post-pandemic anecdote for customer attraction and retention. However, keeping the customer happy is much easier with a CRM system. By reminding sales teams about email follow-ups and booked appointments, CRM is set to get businesses back on their feet in 2021.
On the other hand, CRM reminds sales teams to reach out to clients who have not been contacted for a long time in order to engage them and keep them thinking about their next purchases and whether they should visit your store again. Besides, CRM improves marketing by sending personalized automated customer survey emails, email campaigns, post-purchase emails just at the right time.
Understanding Customer Needs
Businesses need to understand customers buying trends in 2021 to be able to control production and increase return on investment. By tracking customer needs and understanding the entire journey, CRM helps sales teams to sell 0-more and faster. Businesses, therefore, need a CRM system in 2021 to be able to understand new market trends and drive needs-based production and marketing.
Efficient Communication
With the increased competition, keeping a client in the queue is the last thing a company wants to do. As a strategy for business, CRM, therefore, helps a business in 2021 to save customers time by offering ready to use and customizable documents, quotes, email templates, invitations, proposals among many more. This helps sales teams to save time while giving more prompt responses to customers.
