Josh Lyles
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are a great tool for entrepreneurs and businesses that look to personalize and provide an excellent customer experience from pre-sale to post-sale. Here is a brief breakdown of six different ways that CRM software can help you increase your sales while also building customer loyalty.
1) Organize Client Information and History
You may have done this once or a few times, but many people will try to keep track of their customers with spreadsheets. Starting with names, contact information, and then going as far as trying to keep a description of these clients. Then comes my favorite – the highlighting. Red for people we no longer want to contact, yellow if we have contacted them, and green if we need to keep engaging or they purchased.
The reason this is inefficient is that it is hard to keep track of notes, it becomes disorganized with the customers you really want to focus your attention to, and all of this can lead to frustration and giving up. More importantly, it leads to limited sales.
CRMs help you quickly add new customers or businesses, in which a simple search locates them and pulls up their profile with activity history. You can organize their status or stage in the sales process, and from your note-taking (which is crucial), you can display attention-to-detail and pick up where you left off whether you spoke with the client 2 days ago or 2 years ago.
2) Follow-Ups
Follow-up and task reminders are pretty straight forward, but CRMs can help you do a few things manage your time better. They give you the visibility to see which days and times you are loaded with tasks, so you can schedule more optimally.
If you can get into the habit of always trying to schedule a date AND time with a customer, versus marking a task as “hot” then you will increase your rate of response. The reason to prioritize tasks on date and time and not hottest overall task is that all customers have different times they need or want to be contacted. They also have different methods they prefer to be contacted between calls, texts, and emails. The better you can document this information about a customer, you are instantly lifting your level of service to their comfort level.
3) Pipeline Management and Forecasting
Newsflash: sales pipelines are great, if you are organized. A sales pipeline is typically drawn out as a funnel. At the top of your funnel are newer leads that you most likely do not know much about. Clients at the bottom of your funnel are closest to closing based off your previous interactions.
The most effective way to manage your pipeline is to label the stages within your funnel as the checkpoints throughout what you believe is the ideal customer journey, as well as the information you need to cover with the client in each stage. This helps you effectively service your customer and forecast your business, as you can always analyze top and bottom of funnel healthiness.
4) Reporting
Data-driven people live in reports in CRM. Reports are fantastic – you can run reports on Accounts, Deals or Opportunities, Activities, all including the fields you have built for your sales process in your CRM. Through filtering and grouping, you can get granular to find the insights you need: commonalities for wins and losses, types of clients that move forward, locations, source of the lead, and more to help maximize your sales.
Reporting is simply effective because it provides the data to take action. However, data cleanliness and accuracy are two issues with CRM because you are trusting that either you or each member of your team recorded everything correctly. This is where diligent front-end CRM training can garner you a lot of revenue as you scale your business.
5) Expansion
Your current customers are your most valuable because you already have an established relationship with them. This is straight forward – if you have a product or service that requires renewing or updating, or where you have additional add-ons, these are the people you target first. Grant Cardone highlights connecting with existing customers in your CRM in this article. By keeping record of the activity within their account, you can create multiple deals in your CRM and build customer loyalty over time for those that purchase more than once.
The beautiful part about how CRM makes this easy? Custom fields and groups. You can simply build the fields necessary to understand what products a customer has and run a report to find out who does not have what – within a minute. Are you still wanting to use that spreadsheet?
6) Lost Re-engagement
Most sales organizations will lose more sales than they win. The clients that you stop pursuing never leave in a CRM. If you accurately record why you marked them as lost, you can re-engage with them at any time if that reason has now been solved. For businesses with longer sales cycles, this is incredibly valuable. If you are a believer that an initial “no” is not a forever “no,” then you should be running re-engagement campaigns in your CRM constantly.
CRMs have an endless amount of features and integrations to enable you to enhance your client experience. Depending on the work put in, there is a lot to pull out of these systems to increase your revenue with new and existing clients.
Josh Lyles is the founder of Salesdash. Utilizing CRM helped him becoming a top-performing sales advisor and sales leader at Tesla. From there, he became a successful leader in freight for KeepTruckin. Josh resigned from his job in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic to start Salesdash.
