CRM – or Customer Relationship Management – is a software designed to help businesses manage their interactions with current and prospective customers.
Most businesses engage with customers across many channels (email, website, social media, etc). If data isn’t consolidated in one easy to manage location, you could be missing out on opportunities to improve customer relations – and get more sales.
CRM is designed to help your team, small or large, monitor customer interactions across channels, thereby collecting data on what works and what doesn’t with customers.
If you use that data in the right way, it can yield more conversions – which makes CRM software a pretty solid tool to have in the ol’ sales techstack.
In this article, we’ll tell you:
- What exactly is CRM software?
- How does CRM software help businesses?
- How to onboard your team with CRM software
What exactly is CRM software?
CRM software was built to automate many of the tedious and time-consuming tasks that human staff had to perform each day in order to manage customer relationships.
When your team isn’t combing through channels trying to pull data from a hodgepodge of information, it frees them up to focus on tasks like interacting live with customers, focusing on sales and marketing, and nurturing sales.
CRM offers a range of features, including:
- Contact management
- Sales pipeline management
- Customer service
- Marketing automation
- Analytics
Working together, these features help businesses track customer interactions, gain insights into customer behaviour, and identify new opportunities to grow their business.
The ability to monitor each point of the customer journey can help marketing teams funnel resources into high-achieving areas, and feed data to sales reps that they can use to improve conversion rates.
CRM is the basis for scalable sales and growth – which makes it pretty valuable.
Also Read: Learn about AI in Finance: Transforming Canada’s financial services.
How Does CRM Software Help Businesses?
One of the biggest benefits of CRM software for businesses is increased efficiency.
With CRM software, your business can automate many of the tasks associated with managing customer relationships, like:
- Data entry
- Lead scoring
- Follow-up tasks
Streamlining your workflow and focusing resources on more strategic tasks like nurturing sales-ready leads.
CRM software is also a benefit to collaboration. As a centralized platform for managing customer interactions, CRM software helps businesses ensure that everyone in the organization is working with the same data, and has access to the same insights.
Sales and marketing teams that are aligned tend to result in better decision-making and more effective customer interactions.
The ultimate benefit of CRM software
The most important benefit of CRM software is right in the name – improved customer relationships.
Businesses who are tracking data – and using said data strategically to deliver what your customers want and need – ultimately build stronger relationships with those customers.
CRM software can be used to:
- Personalize communications across channels
- Offer tailored solutions to customer problems
- Address customer pain points by adapting the product or service
With the right CRM software in place, your business can compete with much larger organizations to provide the high-quality customer service that customers expect and value when it comes to converting interest in your company and/or product to sales.
How to Onboard Your Team With CRM Software
So, the software probably sounds great!
The real sticking point may be: how do you onboard an entire organization or team to use the software?
Here are some quick tips that might help your team get set up with CRM software:
- Provide training on how to use the software
- Set up user accounts for each team member
- Define the process for how you want to use the CRM software
- Provide ongoing support to help your team through the change process
You can also customize the software to match your branding, create custom fields, and set up automation workflows.
Related: Adopting CRM software is a great way to grow your digital reach and establish brand trust. Find out why that matters.
Access funding opportunities to help you with the changes
There are many funding opportunities that exist in Canada for small- and medium-sized businesses that you probably don’t even know about.
That’s why New Motto exists – to help you research funding opportunities and determine whether you qualify through funding assessments with our funding advisors.
Not only that – we’ll also help you write and submit your funding applications so that you can focus on your business, your team, your products and your clients, while we do the funding legwork.
We can also help you to:
- Create a personalized digital adoption strategy that will be your roadmap to success throughout the digital adoption process
- Help you to learn about and select the AI and digital tools that best fit your business needs
- Help you to onboard your team with support and training on how to use new technologies to make your digital adoption go smoother
- Help you find funding opportunities your business qualifies for that will help offset the costs of digital adoption
- Writing and submitting funding applications so that you don’t need to dedicate man-hours away from caring for your business
Still have questions? Reach out to us today to ask questions using our LiveChat feature, or book a video consultation for free on our online booking app.