The customer relationship management (CRM) market is estimated to grow to $43.5 billion globally by 2024, reflecting the importance of CRMs for sales and business growth.
CRM software can help your business grow by managing many sales processes, from lead scoring to enhancing long-term customer relationships. A CRM allows you to identify growth opportunities, automate sales and marketing functions, and ensure your team is on the same page.
This article guides you through what a CRM is, why it's important, and how you can use it to drive sales and convert leads.
What is a CRM?
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. A CRM is mainly composed of the strategies, approaches, and technologies that a company uses to manage their relationships with current and potential customers. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) most commonly refers to a software system that helps organisations track their communications and nurture relationships with prospects and clients.
A CRM replaces the plethora of spreadsheets, databases, and applications that many organisations use to combine and analyse customer data. CRM software or technology streamlines sales, marketing and customer service efforts resulting in more organisation, efficiency, security, better time management, and satisfied clients.
A CRM collects information throughout every touchpoint in a customer's journey, such as details shared through forms, marketing emails, interactions with customer support and buying patterns. Consolidating this information in a CRM system can help you cater to their needs, cultivate better relationships, and gain valuable sales insights.
Why is a CRM Important for Sales?
A CRM is essential for sales as it manages all of your client and lead data and automates many sales tasks. A CRM centralises all information regarding a customer from different business units such as accounts, marketing, customer service and sales. Without a CRM, salespeople struggle to find important communications and remember what they said in previous meetings. A CRM system may also help sales managers analyse important sales metrics such as how many leads are in each step of the sales funnel, the total turnover and lost sales.
CRM software is one of the most powerful tools in the sales toolkit. It is much more than just a contact management system. When leveraged to its maximum potential, a CRM enables salespeople to spend more time with current and potential customers, allowing them to close more details and retain key clients.
The top five reasons why a CRM is important for sales include:
- Allows you to manage the details and tasks concerning several contacts without remembering everything.
- Keeps your sales activities organised, manages your pipeline, and saves you from losing track of your deals and relationships from getting derailed.
- Enables you to segment and sort your prospect database and assign them to stages in your pipeline, helping you remember who to follow up with and when.
- Gain accurate and real-time sales reports and forecasts
- Increased collaboration and information sharing between sales, customer service and marketing allow for more efficiency and productivity.
What is the Role of CRM in Sales?
A CRM supports salespeople in two of the most significant challenges. The first is qualifying and following up with leads, and the second is prioritising sales activities. Below are some of the roles of CRM in sales:
Keeps You Organised
CRM enables companies to be more productive by organising and automating specific areas of their operations. CRM software assists the sales team in prioritising outreach efforts and organising leads using a scoring system. A CRM system allows you to enter sales data about your clients to make it simple to keep track of their details. You can even monitor and control all of their activities online, and it's simple to take action on each call. Because a CRM supports information exchange, business units can access the information from a centralised area without communicating specifics to one another.
Improves Lead Management
Lead management is the process through which new leads are qualified, analysed, and nurtured so that salespeople can convert them into new business opportunities. CRM software helps to automate this process and track essential information about leads.
Automates Routine Tasks
A CRM allows you to automate routine tasks such as capturing lead data and logging emails. These tasks make little difference to profitability but free up a salesperson's time, increasing productivity. A CRM enables salespeople to automatically pull data from their prospect's records allowing them to send a customised email quickly.
How CRMs Can Help Drive Sales and Convert Leads
Traditionally CRMs only captured customer details and communications. Nowadays, they have evolved to include automation and lead generation functionalities. Below are the top ways to leverage your CRM to help drive sales and convert leads.
- Track Sales
If you want to close sales and nurture connections, you must regularly monitor your sales process. Using a CRM to monitor your sales process can assist you in identifying and correcting problems in your approach to increasing sales. A CRM system can monitor each stage of the process and inform you what is working, what isn't, and what you need to do.
- Information Sharing
A sales team contacts numerous leads and makes several presentations weekly. CRM software can help you organise your activities, ensuring everyone is on the same page limiting the possibility of unintentional mistakes that can make your organisation appear unprofessional, such as calling the same lead multiple times. A CRM system can record all vital information and communicate it with your team, ensuring that everyone is up to date on the status of sales. Ensuring your sales team have the necessary information will reduce costly mistakes and improve productivity, ultimately driving more sales.
- Reporting and analytics
CRM software can track lead data, allowing you to assess your return on investment. A CRM also identifies which lead sources provide the highest returns so you can further invest in them. Creating sales projections, monitoring the pipeline and identifying areas when buyers drop off are further examples of analytics features that a CRM provides.
- Automation
CRM software relieves sales teams of most administrative duties by minimising and eliminating time-consuming, repetitive tasks. CRMs automate other day-to-day activities, increasing the productivity and efficiency of your salespeople. CRM automation may involve data input and changes to client details, follow-up communications, lead nurturing campaigns, sales workflows, and more. When you combine the power of a CRM application with the efficiency of marketing automation, you create a robust sales and marketing machine.
- Capture Leads
Capturing leads is a straightforward technique to increase sales. CRM can track form fills, allowing your team to be alerted of any interest on a particular website page. This allows the sales team to follow up via call or email with as much information as possible for their pitch. The leads are then routed directly to the person in your sales department who may contact them and build a connection. This lead capturing system ensures that no leads are lost and correctly assigned to a sales team member.
- Effective Upselling
A CRM gathers customer data such as purchase history, buying patterns, and preferences. You may need an integration from your eCommerce platform or accounting software to do this. Salespeople can utilise this data to make personalised offers that are likely to be highly relevant to the clients, improving sales revenue and customer satisfaction with the service.
How to Use DISC Assessments in your CRM
DISC is the most widely used, researched, and well-validated behavioural framework available, trusted by millions of organisations worldwide. When you combine the DISC style information of your customers with your CRM, you receive an abundance of information to personalise and drive sales.
A great feature of a CRM is the ability to create your own fields. At HR Profiling Solutions, we've included a field to our CRM to add the DISC profile of our clients. Drawing on our customers' DISC style, we enrich our understanding of an account beyond generic prospect insights and data points. The DISC profile information helps us understand our customers' personality traits, communication styles, buying preferences, and motivations. Using this information, we can customise our communications to our clients, enabling more favourable interactions.
As well as adjusting your communication, you can also track the DISC profile of the leads you can convert. For example, you may have a higher conversation rate success with a particular DISC style. From the data, users will see that they may need to target more of those DISC personalities or adjust their strategy to reach other DISC types to make more sales.
DISC personality profiles enable salespeople to understand how to motivate buyers and drive deals forward with behavioural insights. Drawing on their knowledge, salespeople can adjust their pitch to speak confidently and persuasively to every behavioural style in the room, ultimately driving sales and converting more leads.
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