CRM Part 3: Becoming More Efficient

As your business looks to grow, improve or simply keep up with the ever-changing marketplace, it’s vital to set up and maintain proper operational practices. After all, if your processes are not being implemented effectively or if they don’t align with your business goals, you cannot move forward.

The same applies to your CRM. If you’re not using it to improve your current processes, enable your sales team to be more productive or maintain simplicity, then your sales functions will not be as efficient as they can be.

Here are some tips on how to become more efficient using your CRM:

Improve your key business processes

Every business has its key processes – whether they involve accounts, recruitment or sales. They are the most effective way to drive consistency, good decision-making and best practices. So, it’s a good idea to continually review them by looking at your current output and examining the areas where you can make improvements or boost efficiencies

Processes can be created and implemented within a business with a purpose or they may simply evolve over time. No matter how a process is born, it’s essential to ensure that all your processes continue to deliver the intended benefit to your business, and as times and technologies change, your processes should change too. It’s also important that your employees are only involved in the areas of work that cannot be automated or simplified through the use of technology or process change.

CRM is a piece of technology that you can use to enable and drive process changes when it comes to your sales and marketing activities, saving both time and money.

Utilising CRM within your sales team can supplement, streamline and even improve your sales process. Ensuring opportunities follow a workflow that drive faster, more efficient decision-making as well as smoother management of customers and prospects, can significantly boost your conversion and customer satisfaction rates.

In the meantime, marketing can pull powerful data on your business’ customer base and use it to focus its efforts on high-impact targeted customer communications.

You can also use CRM reports to identify the areas of strength and weakness within your sales process. After that, you can spread your strengths as a best-practice process and review your weaknesses to come up with improvements.

Enable your team

To ensure your team is adding maximum value to the business, CRM plays an important role in collating and providing data to your employees in a world where knowledge is power.

It’s imperative to deliver a high-quality service to customers, whether they are interacting with you for the first time or frequently. Customers want quick solutions to their problems and answers from the first person they speak to. Having all your customer interactions in one place makes that an easy thing to do.

Using your CRM, you can give your team the power to manage follow-up activities with accuracy and ease, keeping on top of both, your VIP customers and those infrequent spenders. In addition, you can provide your employees with access to their historic interactions to make it easier for them to assess each customer’s needs and address them accordingly.

Keep it simple, keep it integrated

As your business grows, the complexity of systems grows as well. It can be time-consuming and expensive to manage all these different systems, while ensuring your data is synced correctly across all of them and keeping each user engaged. You also end up with more training and support costs!

So, keep it simple and integrated by having an integrated system that keeps all your data in one place.

One way of setting up data, plus one set of data to maintain, leaves you with one system to learn. This will save you both time and money – exactly what you want for your sales team and your business as a whole.

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