In this difficult economy, it is important for your company to work as a team to create and maintain successful customer relationships. Your business revolves around your customers, their needs and their issues. Typically, communication with customers and prospects often involves a number of departments like sales, engineering, marketing, accounting, and customer support. In most companies, these departments still use separate systems becoming ‘islands of information’ preventing the sharing of this valuable customer knowledge.
Here’s why you will benefit from an integrated CRM:
All of your departments will have the same experience
Your users will experience the same interface across all your departments. Your entire company will communicate in the same way with the same information at hand. For example, when marketing sends a campaign to a targeted list, your sales managers will get immediate visibility to that. When customer service provides a solution to a customer, sales similarly, will have visibility to that solution.
You’ll have better visibility into key customer processes
Your executives will have better visibility into key customer processes. These include lead flow, the opportunity pipeline, sales forecasts, issues from key customers, visibility into the customer support process, and monitoring of product engineering.
Your sales team will improve efficiency
Your sales team will become more effective. When they are in contact with the customer or sales prospect, they have all the information needed right at hand. This improves the effectiveness of the sales rep’s communication with the customer and can improve closing ratios and gross margins.
You’ll have to manage only one vendor
With multiple vendors, you need to manage multiple relationships and communicate to multiple vendors wasting valuable time and resources. You won’t have to manage the recurring task of reviewing multiple invoices every month. Remember all that time you wasted during searching, reviewing, sitting in on hours of demos, pricing and interviewing third party suppliers?
You’ll reduce IT systems cost
With an integrated CRM system, your company will have fewer systems to deploy and support. This will decrease your overall IT systems cost.