CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is a business strategy designed to improve a business’s ability to generate leads, keep prospects engaged, build strong relationships with external contacts, improve the customer experience, and close deals.

When talking about CRM, we refer to two things:

• The strategic behavior and guidelines that help make the sales process more efficient and successful with both existing and potential customers

• The feature-rich software is specifically designed to streamline the selling process of a business

While the software aspect of CRM isn’t the only part of the strategy, it’s the key piece that enables the strategy. A successful CRM strategy implements the data that CRM software provides about how best to build relationships with leads, customers, and more.

So who should Use CRM?

The primary function of CRM software that is designed for sales teams (and many of them are) is to present a clear picture of who your prospects are and what stage of the buying process they’re in. This software includes tools to help you progress leads through your selling process, providing data about how to refine your selling techniques.

Other teams can use information stored on a sales CRM too. Human Resources and Customer Support can access communications between a company and buyer to better understand a client’s position, while marketing teams can review the number of qualified leads a previous campaign delivered to the sales team to determine its success. Senior management, meanwhile, can use CRM software to check on projected sales for the next month and forecast revenue, (instead of manually referring to a spreadsheet which increases the risk of human error).

CRM helps make sense of who you should be looking to sell to and communicate with about your products. Thanks to CRM’s outward gaze on your leads and customers, you can identify and maximize your sales options by collecting customer data about how you sell and who exactly you’re selling to.

CRM used to be an expensive outlay for a company, but with the move to the cloud in recent years, CRM is now an affordable option for even small businesses. Subscription-based models remove the huge overhead and CRM providers take care of server storage on their end.

Many providers have mobile apps too, so as long as you have an internet connection, you’ll be able to access your CRM database on the go, a great convenience for sales reps on the move.

When should you use CRM?

It’s never too soon to implement a CRM strategy. Even as a start, you should have techniques and guides in place on how to manage leads at different stages of a deal, the best ways to communicate with prospects, and so on. 

There’s a reason why high-performing organizations use CRM to carry out many of their key sales activities, such as:

• Keeping track of who they’re selling to, logging all previous communications and future engagement activities with each lead

• Using powerful in-built features, such as Pipedrive’s Smart Contact Data or LeadBooster, to gain a better understanding of their leads and how best to approach them

• Automating a large variety of time-consuming manual jobs like email campaigns, call logging, form filling, lead qualification, and more

• Tracking metrics and producing sales data on the success of their selling techniques, allowing new strategies to be tested and the results collected, as well as accurate forecasting

How does it work?

The first step of CRM is to identify the different stages of your sales pipeline: essentially, the different stages each lead moves through on the way to making a deal. This includes leads you’re intending to cold-call, one’s who’ve expressed an interest in your product, any who are close to becoming a genuine prospect, and existing customers you’re hoping to upsell or cross-sell to. In fact, all the leads you have (even those yet to properly enter your funnel, thanks to tools like Leads Inbox).

With your pipeline laid out, you can then begin to build an actionable and repeatable sales process that guides your team through every customer interaction. You can also monitor the success of each stage in your sales process and identify where they could be improved.

Once you have a clear idea of the different sections of your pipeline, you can begin to use your CRM software to expand your abilities within those sections. One of the most powerful ways a CRM can help you is by automating parts of the lead prospecting process – something that can sap a large amount of time away from your reps when you’d rather they were selling.

How does automation help?

CRM software allows you to automate large parts of the lead generation process. You can create chatbots to talk to visitors to your website, starting the relationship with your lead immediately.

Once you’ve populated your pipeline with leads, you can continue the lead qualification process with tracked engagement activities.

You can reach out to them with automated emails personalized for each contact based on criteria such as their job role, lead source, and industry, tracking the click-through rate of your communications. By integrating your CRM with an email marketing tool, you can even create flows that react to triggers in your sales process, such as when a deal moves to the next stage.

Once you’ve made contact with your leads, your CRM will automatically record all your correspondence, making it easy for anyone on your team with the right permission settings to check where leads are in the sales funnel and what their specific needs are at a moment’s notice.

Understanding the data

By this point, you’ll have a fairly good idea of not only who your individual leads are and what they want, but also common traits your successful leads have in common. You can then use this to optimize your lead qualification automation, updating chatbots and webforms to prioritize leads who are more likely to convert to high-value customers.

You can also tailor your sales pitches to their needs. Your proposals should be about letting your leads see how your product can solve their problem, and you can create a much more effective sales proposal template if you understand your leads.

Good CRMs also make it easy to share data between team members and people in other departments, using accessible dashboards and viewing options. This makes handovers easy, and if a manager needs to be brought in regarding a client issue, it can happen immediately without interrupting the rep’s workflow.

With all this in place, you’ll have everything you need to cultivate a powerhouse sales team. With your clearly defined pipeline, your repeatable processes and shareable sales data, you’ll be ready to use the secret weapon in the CRM arsenal: data-driven sales.

By charting your key sales metrics, you’ll record valuable information about your pipeline, such as the percentage chance of a lead moving from one stage of the pipeline to the next. When you combine this metric with the revenue created from a potential deal, you have the beginnings of a sales forecast, giving you an expected revenue based on real-time data from your CRM.

Expand your capabilities

You can also sync third-party integrations or apps with your CRM to provide specific tools your business might need, such as call center capabilities, multi-platform campaign planners, social media, e-commerce, and much more.

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