There are many reasons why a business should enlist a CRM for lead management. Read the 5 main reasons how can a CRM make your life easier.
Creating stellar lead management starts with having great salespeople, but it certainly doesn’t end there. Imagine getting a group of amazing race car drivers and only providing them bicycles for the big race. Going out on a limb perhaps with old-schoolers, the phone and a spreadsheet are about as basic an approach as a 10-speed through the park is to a Mustang blazing down the Autobahn. In today’s sales environment you need a muscle car for your salespeople to tear up the roads, take those corners with ease– collect and close those leads! Enter the CRM, or Customer Relationship Management software. There are countless reasons why a business should enlist a CRM for lead management, but five of those unquestionably rise to the top.
Great Customer Service, because no two memories are alike.
Different people have different communication skills. It should come as no surprise that when tasked to remember something, the record is going to vary wildly from case to case. On average though, after one hour, people retain less than half of the information they’ve learned. Going even further, studies say that after one day, people forget more than 70 percent, and after six days, people forget 75 percent of the information. Without a real-time system to document all the relevant details of a sales call, things are going to slip through the cracks, much like that post-it note with a scribbled number for a new client—was he named Bob, or was it, Rob?
Great customer service requires attention to details, and the human mind, while amazing, just cannot handle everything. A customer wants to feel valued.
If you can’t remember what their name was, or what they wanted to purchase, they’re going to feel like just another face in the crowd. If, however, you can answer their call with all details in order, it will build purchase confidence and also make them feel taken care of. That’s the beauty of a CRM. Everything you need to track is right there in front of a salesperson. Memory not required.
Upselling a Customer, because why not?
So how about those loyal customers that are just sitting on a list. With CRM scheduling, alerting and purchase details readily available, a salesperson can upsell with extraordinary ease. This is how car dealerships seem to know exactly the right time to send an email about great trade-in offers for newer, sleeker versions of your car. Mobile phone companies are also adept at this. They track a person’s usage and send out emails to solicit an upgraded plan that will be more practical for the client’s needs.
Internal Communication with Sales Team, because it’s vital for peak sales performance.
Getting disconnected or needing to call a salesperson back inspires understandable dread in most people. They don’t want to explain their previous call to a different person, not only for the redundancy of it, but because of that limited memory space thing we discussed earlier. A CRM provides instant communication of all necessary details throughout a sales team. If you have a change in staff, or even for something as simple as someone going out to lunch or on a vacation, any other available salesperson can pick up where the other left off. This creates an atmosphere of competency and efficiency that consumers appreciate. Not to mention fellow sales team members! They don’t have to ask the same questions, and the customer doesn’t have to give the same answers. At the very start, the process is off and running, ready to convert those leads.
Track the Customer Journey, because more information leads to better strategy.
And speaking of leaving off where you started, a CRM also illustrates a customer’s journey that ordinarily would not be as well documented. Using our car example: they bought the vehicle, they received a voucher for an oil change, they used the voucher, they liked the dealership’s Facebook page, and now it would seem like a pretty good time to send them a review request. The scenarios and journeys throughout the sales process (and after) are nearly endless and unique, but a CRM can allow a business to categorize the customers who need to be nurtured with a specific strategy in mind, based on their past interactions of where, when, how and why.
Cross Platform Integration, because it makes everything easier.
It cannot be stressed how important cross platform integration is and will continue to be. Calling back Facebook from the previous example, there is no doubt that ad campaigns through social media sites have become a significant part of marketing and sales. Integrating into a CRM a social media campaign, email blast campaign, Google and Bing ad campaigns, project management tools and countless others is not only made to be simple, it also makes everything in the entire process much easier. Why keep a separate spreadsheet of leads acquired through Facebook when that information goes directly into a CRM’s database without any human effort? It just makes too much sense as a great advantage to your business’s best management practices.
So, if lead management is a science, a good CRM is a fully stocked laboratory. A business can try different workflow strategies to remain top-of-the-brain, it can nurture warm leads until they’re burning hot, it can return to cold leads in an efficient, non-harassing manner, and above all else it can make the very most out of your team, to grow sales, and successes.
If you can relate to any of these issues or would appreciate any of these benefits, then let’s have a chat about your current business needs and if it’s beneficial for you, show a live demonstration of QContact.