Imagine: you are a marketing executive who is jazzed to add a strong technical aspect to your marketing strategy. You realize the benefits to a marketing technology with targeted email campaigns, automated social media and lead generation capabilities. Picture: you are a sales executive seeking a way to better funnel your company’s sales pipeline and lead qualification process. The sales and marketing executives have a common goal: implementing a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Whether coming from marketing or sales roots, CRM can be a driving motivator for your company.
Now that marketing and sales have agreed on a need for a CRM system, what’s next? It is time to build a case for the rest of the executives, whether it is the CEO, CFO or CIO, how a CRM system will increase sales and marketing success. You must demonstrate how a CRM system will allow your teams to better interact with current and prospective clients and sell your executives on all the ROI awaiting both sales and marketing initiatives. A CRM system that is supported by their executive team is often the most successful.
Check out these opportunities to demonstrate CRM’s value to your executives or any other doubters for that matter!
- Increases sales and marketing success: When the entire team knows the goals of an initiative, there is greater success. CRM gives a platform for reviewing all campaigns and analytics of past campaigns to ensure goals are met or show where changes must be made to meet goals.
- Manages customers better: CRM assists companies in managing current or prospective customers through providing a central location for documenting notes and past actions with companies for the entire team to see. While each salesperson is responsible for their particular territory, CRM simplifies processes if someone is out of the office, turnover occurs or if there is a realignment of accounts. It keeps your sales team competitive and in the driver’s seat consistently. It also allows marketing to communicate with prospective and current clients in a simple, sensible manner.
- Analyzes and qualifies leads better: CRM offers a centralized location for collecting information on prospects, creating personalized campaigns and analyzing campaign results. With a centralized location to gather all of the details needed to qualify a lead, the business will have increased productivity, driving lead tracking towards business growth.
- Improves customer communication: Strong communication leads to less repetitive outreach, as you will be able to reach prospects at the right time with the right messaging earlier. CRM also provides strength in analytics of all campaigns sent for future use.
- Socialize with your customers: CRM is customer-centric, connecting with current and prospective customers wherever they are, including social media. CRM assists in automating social media processes to drive lead generation and tracking the social outreach. As your posts are liked, shared and commented on, CRM will fine tune future campaigns to fit those actions.
- Time saver: Through implementing a CRM system, wasted time will be limited, in terms of searching through old notes to find the correct customer from four years ago with a co-worker who has since left the company. CRM stores the most necessary information and its easy-to-use formatting works with the sales team to store the information they need most.
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