Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System is a piece of software that manages a company’s interactions with customers and/or potential customers. According to a Sweeny Group definition, “CRM is all the tools, technologies and procedures to manage, improve, or facilitate sales, support and related interactions with customers, prospects, and business partners throughout the enterprise.” As you can see, a CRM gives you the ability to utilize quite a bit of useful tools.
One useful component you’ll want to take advantage of is the sales force automation that a good CRM System will provide you. You’ll want to customize your sales process and tier your prospects as you see fit. It’s extremely important that your sales process is truly your sales process. Getting stuck with another company’s cookie cutter workflow won’t help you unless maybe you’re within the same industry. Even then, each organization has its own style and specific tasks to do. The right CRM application will allow you to accomplish this without giving you grief. Now, you’ll have an automated system that tells you what to do for each prospect and what step they’re in within the sales process. You no longer have to keep track of it. The CRM system will do it for you.
A CRM system will essentially function as customer database software for you. It’ll capture all your customer or potential customer information that you choose to have. One positive is that the CRM software organizes everything for you. It puts all your contacts in one place and then you can log the history for each contact. You can say that you spoke to Bill last week about topic A, and you followed up with Bill a few days later about it. You also have all his contact information right there in front of you. That eliminates the need to use other applications to look up Bill’s information, and then use another program to find out what the call was about.
One of the other advantages of using a CRM system is the ability to utilize a marketing automation platform. However, what is marketing automation? Well, it’s the ability to setup and schedule tasks such as email blasts, social media posts etc. to be executed automatically. It eliminates the work of having to assign a person to do it every day or every other day. Instead it can be done all at once and then scheduled. This way the next 10 email blasts are setup and kick off for you. Those Facebook posts, tweets, and LinkedIn posts are scheduled and run without having to micromanage them each day. You can do all that without having to break the bank on the “best marketing software.” That frees up a lot more time for you to take care of much more pressing matters.
This software is something you should be using. It doesn’t matter what size of a business that you own or are a part of. All businesses can utilize the features that a CRM system has to offer. It is the one tool that is applicable to all organizations. However, the trick is to find the right one for your company.
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