7 Best CRM Strategies for Your Business: With the Benefits

CRM is the buzzword that is driving many businesses towards scalability, growth and success at a reasonably fast pace. The advent of CRM can be traced way back to 2006 when the first CRM software was launched by HubSpot with automation at its very core. Since then, we have come a very long and seen a number of evolutions in this niche, keeping step with the rapid and varied digitization of specific niches and industries.

The year 2020 is a challenging year in this regard, considering the uncertainties in which the markets are trying to revive themselves. At the helm of this revival process are businesses of all sizes and hence, this makes it even more imperative to choose the right CRM software for your business so that you can optimize the resources that you have in order to get ahead of the competition and reach your goals.

Before we get down to the CRM strategies that you can employ in the face of these unprecedented times in which we are bravely trying to do business online and otherwise, we should get a clear understanding of what CRM actually is. CRM or customer relationship management is a technology that gives rise to a systematic workflow within which all the information may be captured and called up for specific marketing and sales functions that ultimately garner conversions. So, in essence, a CRM software helps you record and use all the information pertaining to engagement and interactions with leads, prospects and customers so that you can get a new customer, a re-sell, an up sell or even a cross sell for a new product line.

Needless to say, the right CRM software would do more than merely putting your information into the right boxes. When you have a CRM software running in the backend, you can easily integrate a number of tools to automate the marketing and sales functions so that you and your team members are more hands on when it comes to servicing the customer and for engaging with new ones. This will bring in higher revenue and make your brand a rather professional looking one. Apart from the obvious benefits like organization and increase bandwidth, there are a number of other benefits that would depend on the strategy that you use when you employ the right CRM software. Here are 7 CRM strategies that can bring your A game on:

1. Analysis and Understanding of Your Market and Core Audience: This would be one of the foremost tools that can take you from zero to 100 and even further, if applied well. With this strategy, you can start out by creating a framework where each effort and each team member goes through the analysis process at the end of every task or activity. This would be matched with the feedback of the customer and thereafter, analytics and insights be forged with exact performance result reports. This would be helpful in understanding where the gaps are and where exactly the business would need further improvement and fine tuning. With an analysis based strategy, you will always be ready for the win because you will have your feet firmly on your path and your eyes looking around to see what you may or may not be missing out on. This is something that the right CRM software can easily do for your business and teams.

2. Integrations for the Win: You should base your CRM strategy on the functions that you need and the integrations that you would accordingly have to bring in. For example, if you have a B2B or a business to business model for your business, you would need more informative deliverables that would keep others in the niche or the industry in the know so that you can engage them and turn them into your customers. This would ideally demand more content centric engagement than simple marketing. Therefore, you would have to choose the right marketing and sales automation tools that would help you make conversions in such a scenario. The right CRM software would allow you to make many such integrations where you can even choose the right platform and the tools that you need, along with customized features for your business needs.

3. Information Based Strategy: This CRM strategy would give your customers plenty of information in order to woo them and would depend on plenty of collaborations for content creation that would be built into the email marketing framework of the CRM software This strategy can curate information as per the choices and preferences of the core audience so as to define and help mold the behavioural patterns and influence their buying intent as well.

4. Customer Service: This is a very important strategy that should be necessarily built into every single CRM software. The right CRM software should come with this strategy so that the servicing of a request or the response to a query, or anything in between should be uppermost on the list of priorities so that the brand value grows as does the word of mouth recommendations that would bring in even more customers.

5. Online Selling Strategy: If you are not selling online as yet, you would do well to come up with a CRM strategy that would offer E Commerce options as well since this would immediately engage with the right customers and make a sale in a more seamless environment without aimless steps and excessive communication.

6. Data Cleaning for Further Intelligence: We all know that a CRM software is a data driven one. But it is equally important to remove old and duplicate data so that your strategy would remain bang on and very relevant. This information could pertain to trends, contact information, old communication and many other such fields.

7. Accountability Strategy: This would be one of the most important strategies that can create better functioning teams and team members who collaborate in a more responsible manner for growth.