What is CRM?
What is CRM? Customer relationship management, or CRM for short, refers to the technology and processes that an organisation uses to manage its external and internal contacts and relationships.
A CRM system helps simplify an organisation's processes so that they can increase sales and improve customer interactions.
What can CRM software do?
A CRM system can be used to manage relationships with individuals at all touchpoints. A CRM tool can help salespeople automate their sales activities and managers track their team’s performance. With a CRM, you’ll know when to reach out to your sales leads, what to say and how to say it.
The core benefits of using a CRM tool:
Identify internal challenges
Map the customer journey
Collaborate with internal teams
Define your metrics and track sales KPIs
Track business milestones
You can integrate other tools with your CRM, meaning that many of the programs you use on a day-to-day basis will be just a few clicks away from your CRM sales dashboard, or even a part of it. With these integrations, you can get more qualified leads to your sales team, help them automate their sales activities and drive more leads through the pipeline so they become customers.
Just a few of the tools you can integrate with a quality CRM include:
Business email marketing
VoIP and calling software
Accounting and invoicing
Analytics and data visualisations
Chatbots and messenger apps
Task and resource management
Customer support
Marketing automation
So, what is CRM good for? Well, with the right CRM you can manage your lead relationships from first contact all the way to repeat deals. You can actively track and monitor your team's success and find out who is struggling, then use the data to help them improve. You can accurately forecast your sales and revenue using your analytics tools. You can reduce the hours spent doing mind-numbing admin tasks so that you and your team can focus on what really matters: closing deals and selling your products and solutions.
And it's not just sales teams that can benefit from using a CRM: recruitment, project management and administration teams (to mention a few) can too.
