What role CRM software plays in aligning your sales process?

CRM software market has seen a boom in the past decade or so. But you can’t blame people for the slow adoption rate, they don’t like what they don’t understand, do they? CRM software has been around for more than a decade now, and as the below stats shows, it is here to stay.

The global customer relationship management market is expected to reach USD 81.9 billion by 2025 – Grand View Research, Inc

But the question lingers, what role CRM software plays in aligning your sales?

The very definition of CRM!

Customer relationship management(CRM) is a smart sales software that tracks your smallest sales interaction.

• Be it your prospects or customers, be it the past or present, CRM captures all the interactions.
• It keeps them streamlined against your contacts, companies, or deals.
• CRM software enables business and salespeople to develop, build, and manage a long-lasting customer relationship.
• A smart CRM software will take the past data and interactions into account for developing future strategies.

The meaning and use of CRM software differ as per the industry and the people. Though in layman term CRM means Customer Relationship Management, managing customer relationships is just one of the many capabilities of a CRM software.

Gartner predicted that the CRM industry will grow to a $36.5 billion market worldwide by 2017.

The benefit of adopting CRM software

Salespeople benefit the most from the various features a modern-day CRM software offers. Businesses used to struggle as they had to manage the time spent on feeding data into CRM and making the most of their remaining selling time.

However, with the right pipeline management tool, businesses can streamline their processes and focus more on selling, without sacrificing the accuracy and quality of their data.

• The hesitation of adopting a sales CRM has gone way down post the technological advancements.
• Automation, smart insights, detailed report generation, in-built calling, and many other features have allowed modern sales professionals to be more productive without losing much of their selling time.
• Modern sales professionals can easily use CRM and adapt to the on-the-go style of doing business with mobile CRM apps.
• A centralized data repository that can is accessible from any place, at any time and from any device makes CRM the most treasured sales tool for the coming years.

As a sales professional working for a startup or even as a member of the remote sales team of an entrepreneur, CRM is the best choice. It is beneficial against bulky spreadsheets and the constant switch between email programs and CRM system. DKIM and third-party app integration make CRM software the best sales tool in this competitive modern era.

Let’s dig a little deeper to make you understand what role does CRM software play in aligning sales.

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Email marketing

As a startup owner or an entrepreneur who needs to get the word out regarding their service or product, you will need a platform that gets the message to people.

• You meet people, and you reach out to the contacts of your networks, you use LinkedIn to make a sales pitch.
• In short, as a business owner, you are making strides in collecting the contact information of your potential customers.
• Once you have a list of email contacts with you, it is time to take the next step.
• Now you will add these email addresses inside your email program and start shooting emails.
• Many emails will have brochures, and others will have discounts or attractive deals, some others will have requests for scheduling a meeting or a call.

You see, your needs are varied, and so are the nature of these emails. You will use labels inside the email programs to bifurcate your email contacts and start your outreach campaign.

Once you establish first contact and an ice-breaking session with the prospects, you will carry out various steps in your sales process. This is where you start losing touch with your previous contacts and start leaking leads out of your system.

The solution!

Business owners often take the help of email marketing programs such as Constant Contact or MailChimp. These smart email tools help salespeople establish contact with hot leads. These email marketing tools have the capability of importing your contacts from an Excel spreadsheet.

Most CRM systems allow users to track their outreach emails. Such a feature keeps the guesswork away from the whole sales process and enables salespeople to focus their energy and resources on the hot leads. These four analytics enable salespeople in concentrating on worthy sales leads.

1. Email open rate – Number of subscribers who opened and viewed your email.
2. Email bounce rate – Number of subscribers who did not receive your email.
3. Links clicked – The links inside your email message that were clicked.
4. Attachment downloaded – The PDF or Word Or Image files that were downloaded by the recipients.

The above paragraph would have made you understand the importance of CRM in marketing as well as sales but isn’t customer service also a crucial part of your business process.

Role CRM software plays: email marketing to sales and customer service

46 percent of sales teams report widespread use of CRM systems – Entrepreneur, 2018

In this portion of our article, we will help you understand how CRM software is allowing salespeople to use a single platform to merge all the business process together.

Modern CRM software allows businesses to handle sales, marketing, customer service and even project management using robust features and integrations.

About 10 years ago, only 12% of businesses used cloud-based CRM, which now has increased to 87%. Software Advice

Modern cloud-based CRM software offers better integration and customization to sales professionals that enable them to have a 360-degree view of their customers.

Whether you use email platform inside CRM or individually, it will be used for reaching out to the newly created leads with your product or service details. However, integrating these two individual platforms will allow businesses to build a loyal customer base.

Let’s answer the ‘how’ that just popped up in your mind while reading this line.

When you use in-built email functionality of a CRM software, it not just streamlines your sales and marketing email communications.

It also helps you streamline everything in your business process, from support ticket servicing to SLA (Service Level Agreement), alert statuses to project management. A smart sales CRM will always allow businesses to enhance the customer acquisition process.

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Role CRM software plays: email marketing to marketing automation

To date, nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads. DemandGen Report

We talked about email marketing and the related campaigns that allow marketing teams to look for and identify crucial leads, before handing them over to the sales department.

• The purpose of designing an email marketing campaign is to convince your leads and forward them onto your landing pages.
• CRM adoption increased because of the growing importance of lead generation.
• CRM software allows the business to merge email marketing and marketing automation successfully.
• Because of this merger, the entire lead to loyal customer funnel of every business will easily streamline.

CRM also allows sales department to enhance their lead generation process for nurturing leads into sales-ready customers. Let’s understand this statement with an example.

For instance.

‘Prospect X’ visited your website. After surfing the content on your website for a while he:

• Subscribes to your email newsletter requesting you to share a free eBook
• Downloads the eBook from the email
• Opens the first follow up email
• Clicks the link within your email
• Watches a video attached inside your email
• Shares the video on his Facebook post and tags your business too

You can bifurcate these steps and mark them with your own ranking system. If watching and sharing your attachment on social media is a highly ranked action, then you have found your most important lead.

Now is the perfect time to hand the leads over to your sales team. The sales team will include the leads in your lead nurturing program and teach them everything about your business and your offerings.

So, what role CRM software plays in aligning sales?

The global CRM software market is valued at $120 billion – Forbes, 2018

As we discussed at the start, the importance and meaning of CRM vary industry-to-industry. However, if you are a small or mid-sized business, then for you, a CRM will always mean something more than just a customer relationship management software.

For you, CRM will be the way of streamlining your entire business process, cutting down manual labor, performing sales tasks with utmost simplicity, all this, in a budget-friendly manner.

• No business wants its customers to leave their services after one-off purchase.
• The cost of acquiring is increasing daily, which makes process optimization a crucial part of providing the best customer service and experience.
• Also, it enables your sales team to create a better and stronger relationship with your clients.
• CRM software will allow you to create a loyal customer base for your brand.
• CRM plays a vital role in sales. The purpose is to create a process of nurturing the leads.
• Better nurtured leads will always stay loyal to your brand and will also refer your services and products to their peers.
• CRM is pivotal to acquiring your contact’s information, storing it inside the system in a well-stacked manner, keeping all the records of the past interactions.  
• CRM software enables businesses to organize their business processes around their customers.
• It makes you and your sales team better, productive and efficient.

Conclusion

We hope this article was able to highlight the role CRM software plays in aligning sales?. We wanted to help you gain insight about its importance not just in sales but the overall business process. Business is developed with all the processes intact and cannot survive upon an individual department.

Introducing a CRM software into the mix will help you understand what is lacking in the business process and what can be done to fix it. Salesmate CRM is one such sales tool that has been helping small and mid-sized businesses fix their business process errors.

Salesmate CRM has a budget-friendly approach towards developing your business and is the best CRM solution to consider when scaling is in your mind. To know more about this smart sales intelligence tool and the features it provides, do get in touch with us.