Let’s learn CRM!
Hey Guys!
It’s been a long time for a new post after Who is a Sales Engineer?.
In this post I want to share some insights on how a CRM Software helps companies to increase revenue and maintain good relationships with their customers.
What is a CRM ?
CRM stands for “Customer Relationship Management” and this concept was started in the early 1970s. Many CRM softwares came into existence By 1990s and after few years cloud based SaaS CRM softwares were released in the market.
Most companies have a sales team who play a critical role in the profitability of the company and in the implementation of marketing strategies.
Let’s see how a sales network of a small sized SaaS company that develops subscription billing software operates without a CRM.
Lisa is the CEO of a company and she has devised some strategies and campaigns to increase the sales of her company. She hires Ricky and Helen to take care of Field sales and Inside sales.
The product is built and Helen gets leads from many sources.
The marketing team did a great job on generating leads from various sources. Helen was happy on seeing lot of leads generated but the actual problem starts now!
Yeah the problem was to store the lead details. Helen initially thought of using Excel to store lead information but she faced the following problems:
- Helen spends lot of time on doing mundane tasks of exporting leads to an excel sheet.
- To send targeted emails she has to upload all the email addresses of leads in a mail client. She also needs to input the phone numbers in a calling software to make calls.
- Helen couldn’t track the user behaviour after an email is sent. Due to this the Marketing team can’t measure the efficiency of their campaigns.
- Helen also faces a tough time in collaborating with her sales team. She has to manually assign the leads to sales rep based on their territories.
- She faces a tough time on creating the sales reports and Lisa is very unhappy with the numbers.
Helen being an excellent inside sales manager faces a tough time on hitting the sales targets.
Ricky is a street-smart sales person. He meets lot of clients and give presentations about the products.
He initially used an excel to keep track of all the meetings, appointments with clients. But excel didn’t give reminder messages to inform him about any scheduled meetings. Sometimes he misses some important appointments with customers.
So he thought of using some calendar app with reminders. That app prompted him about any followups/meetings but still Ricky faced a problem.
Any field sales rep before meeting a customer for a followup meeting must skim through the customer interactions history. Ricky has to rely on excel every time before going for a meeting. Ricky being super busy, he had a tough time doing this. Eventually he got frustrated and missed his targets.
Both Helen and Ricky think bad about themselves for not doing their job properly.
CRM to the rescue !
How a CRM can help Helen and Ricky?
What if Helen can just use a centralised system where all the leads get accumulated and no need to export as an excel sheet or use an external Database?
What if there is a software via which you can send bulk emails targeting specific group of leads and has an inbuilt phone system to make calls ?
What if there is a system via which a sales manager can groups sales reps based on territories and assign leads to them automatically ?
What if Helen can understand how an user reacts after receiving an email so that she can send appropriate reply email or do an followup activity?
What if the system actually ranks leads based upon certain characteristics so that your sales rep can target the best leads!
What if Helen can create reports in the CRM and show quick insights about the sales performance to Lisa?
What if Ricky uses a CRM which can book appointments, store and update meeting information and can also integrate with Calendar apps?
What if Ricky receives a reminder before a meeting and also he can go through the recent customer interactions history via the CRM?
So all these problems faced by Helen and Ricky can actually be solved by a CRM software [CRM is used to solve many more issues ]
“ CRM is actually a strategy and not a project ”, any successful sales team must have a smart CRM. It is used as a tool for Customer retention and Customer acquisition. CRM can be used by Sales, Marketing and Support teams.
CRM is a centralised software to store all leads, contacts, accounts, deals obtained via different sources like email, chat, signups, chat etc!
CRM provides automation to help sales people to spend more time on their work than doing mundane tasks. CRM can be used to send bulk emails to targeted set of people and also helps in tracking the user behaviour. You can create reports in a CRM and much more!
So what are you waiting for go find a CRM that caters to your company’s goals.
If you are looking out for an affordable CRM to improve your sales revenue and build good relationships with your customer, please have a look at Freshsales CRM a product by Freshworks Inc.
