It’s well known that retaining existing customers is cheaper than acquiring new ones. Yet, it’s often existing customers who end up forgotten in the hectic day-to-day world of sales.
Your salespeople put a lot of time and effort into nurturing prospects and converting them into customers, so why lose them? By utilising a customer relationship management (CRM) system, you can retain your existing customers and maximise the opportunities you have with them.
Here’s why CRM is such a handy tool in this regard:
Knowledge is powerIn a world where customers can get anything, anytime, anywhere, it’s the personal touch that makes all the difference.
By using your CRM system on a daily basis, you can build detailed customer profiles that track their contact and business details as well as information on the competitive products they have purchased. With a CRM system that links back to your main dealer management software, you can also access customer purchase history and other information, such as their credit status and if they are VAT-registered.
Having this kind of contextual information on your customers and their business at any moment throughout the sales process makes it easier to communicate with them on a more personal level and provide them with meaningful solutions to their problems.
It’s a relationship, not just a saleCustomer retention isn’t just about having the right product – it’s also about establishing a strong relationship with your customers. In fact, customers cite that the main reason for moving to a competitor is ‘feeling unloved.’
CRM helps you manage your time and remind you when you need to reach out to a customer, making sure that every customer gets some form of contact from your team. You can accomplish this by using recurring events, which prompt your employees to get in touch with your VIP customers as well as once-in-a-blue-moon spenders at regular intervals – making sure you never miss an opportunity.
This regular contact is the key to building and maintaining relationships with customers. It also helps create the feeling of a company that cares. Couple this with utilising the information stored in your CRM system to communicate with customers more effectively – and you are sure to keep those relationships strong and long-lasting.
Building relationships like these often increases customer loyalty, which makes you their go-to person whenever they need something new.
Regular, more meaningful contact = more revenueBeing more attuned to your customers and their business as well as making sure that you are always on their mind is a major part of the success of a modern-day sales team.
With continuous, meaningful communications, you can achieve the following three big financial gains:
1. Increase in customer spend. By knowing your customers and their needs inside-out, you can ensure that you offer them exactly what they need at all times. This often leads to an increase in spend as customers can see that you understand them and therefore believe that what you are offering will do the job – even if it’s a little more expensive than what they’d first hoped for.
2. Better conversion rates. Building a trusting relationship with your customers means that they are more likely to go for the deal. If you tell them that your solution is what they need, they will be more inclined to believe you and purchase it.
3. Lower costs. With your sales team proactively approaching your customers, you can reduce costs on marketing activities or focus them on other areas that need attention, such as targeting new businesses or achieving specific goals – like increasing parts spending within your existing customer base.
Bring marketing and sales teams togetherCRM makes integrating your sales and marketing teams easy. With marketers having access to all the CRM data, they can select customers for targeted campaigns with ease – whilst the salespeople get to keep this data fresh just by doing their day job.
Your sales team can also benefit from the additional leads and information marketing generates, which leads to more sales. In other words, don’t keep them apart, if you don’t have to!
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